Background.

Historically, savings and loan associations (S and Ls) have served a different body of customers than banks. S and Ls made most of their money by providing services to working-class and middle-class people rather than to large businesses or other financial institutions. In 1903 journalist D. A. Tomkins wrote that the building and loan association gave a solution to the problem of financing people's homes that is most essentially advancement by self-help. According to two authorities on banking systems, with the turn of the century the American banking system rested on three legs: (1) deposit- owned mutual savings banks, (2) stock-chartered savings banks that profited investors rather than depositors, and (3) building and loan associations, later known as savings and loans associations. In 1928 the first great banking crisis of the twentieth century began as the American financial system began collapsing in one of the...