The list of 450 S&Ls with bailout costs greater than $50 million dollars can be used to estimate the cost to the American taxpayers of criminal fraud during the S&L Crisis of 1985 to 1995. The list was prepared with the Macintosh version of MS Excel. With Excel, it is possible to sort the list alphabetically, by the amount of bailout costs, by state, and so on. If you sort by state, then you can determine the amount of the bailout costs for each state. There are instructions at the bottom of this web page which should allow you to download the list off the Internet and into your Excel program.

The total bailout costs for the 450 failed S&Ls with bailout costs in excess of $50 MILLION dollars per S&L amounts to $144,459,606,000. In round figures about $144.46 billion dollars.

One of the great public relations coups of the past century was the concealment of the extent of the S&L crisis from the American people in the months leading up to the presidential election of 1988. As can be seen below, four years after Ronald Reagan signed the new S&L law and after the Reagan Administration stripped many of the S&L regulatory agencies of auditors and investigators, the S&Ls began failing at an ever-increasing rate. In the year leading up to the presidential election of 1988, 101 of the 450 S&Ls failed, information that somehow never made it through to the American people.

The following year, the first year of the Bush Administration, the number of failures peaked at 160, going down to 71 in 1990 and 33 in 1991. It was during this time that the assets of the failed S&Ls --loan porfolios and property holdings -- were looted for the benefit of "well-connected" people.

There is evidently no single report which covers the amount of criminal fraud in the 1101 failed S&Ls of the S&L crisis. A GAO report of 1994 (GAO/GDD 93-94) gives us the data for 723 of the S&Ls that failed between February 7, 1989 and August 28, 1999 and were under the control of the RTC as of September 20, 1992.

In the GAO report, 137 of these failed S&Ls are located in Texas. Here is where the list of the 450 S&Ls with bailout costs GT $50 million helps us understand the true extent of criminal fraud in the S&L crisis. The "450 list" shows that 74 S&Ls had failed before the end of 1988 with bailout costs of almost $40 billion dollars. The "450 list" also shows that of the 137 S&Ls in the GAO report, 71 had bailout costs GT $50 million, for bailout costs of $23.8 billion dollars.

Of the 723 failed S&Ls, 503 S&Ls (69.6 percent) had at least one criminal referral. There were a total of 2,912 criminal referrals associated with the 503 S&Ls. The losses due to alleged fraud in the 503 S&Ls amounted to more than $5.4 billion dollars. (page 9 of the GAO report).

Of the 2,912 criminal referrals, 442 (15 percent) of the criminal referrals involved estimated dollar losses greater than $1 million dollars; 149 (5 percent) involved dollar losses from $500 thousand to $1 million; 429 (15 per cent) involved losses from $100 to $500 thousand, and 280 from $25 to $100 thousand. The remaining 1,612 referrals pertained to dollar losses of less than $25 thousand dollars. (page 12 of the GAO report).

The list of 450 S&Ls with bailout costs greater than $50 million dollars was prepared with the Macintosh version of MS Excel. If you have either the Mac or IBM version of MS Excel you can download the file into your computer and then sort or manipulate the data as in any ordinary spreadsheet.

Step 1. Go the following URL and bring up the web page (it takes about a minute to load).

Step 2. Under "View" in Netscape Navigator, hit "Page Source." This brings up the list in its html format.

Step 3. Do a "Select All," then "Copy." Go over to "File." If the "Save As" button is not highlighted, repeat the process until it is.

Step 4. Download the file in its "Text" format (not "Source")

Step 5. Open the file with MS Excel and hit the "Fixed Width" button. Start the import at row 1 and designate the File origin as "Macintosh"

Step 6. The data in the files should appear in columns, with the name of the S&L in the first column, the city in the second, the state in the third, the date resolved in the fourth, the date failed in the fifth, the bailout costs in the sixth, F for FSLIC or R for RTC in the seventh.

Hit the "Next" button at the bottom, and continue to "Finish."

Step 7. Although I provided ample space for the names of the S&Ls, you may have to do some cleanup where the name "wrapped" into the next row. But from this point on you should have a sortable spreadsheet data base accessible to all Excel commands.