Deregulating small home-loan banks in the 1980s cost US taxpayers over $100 billion

After the US loosened rules on savings and loan associations in 1982, many took federally insured deposits into risky real-estate and junk-bond bets, betting big because losses would land on the government, not them. Over 1,000 institutions eventually failed. The federal cleanup, run through the Resolution Trust Corporation, ended up costing taxpayers more than $100 billion.

— Kitty Calavita, Henry N. Pontell, and Robert Tillman, Big Money Crime: Fraud and Politics in the Savings and Loan Crisis — book, 1997
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