Chapter 20 The Role of Deposit Insurance: Financial System Stability and Moral Hazard

Abstract

The U.S. banking system has attracted substantial attention during the past 15 years. Most of the attention has focused on the large number of failed depository institutions (commercial banks, savings banks, savings and loans, and credit unions) and their unprecedented resolution costs. This attention is certainly appropriate, given the failure from 1980 through 1992 of more than 4,500 federally insured depository institutions with approximately $650 billion in assets and the subsequent resolution by federal authorities at an estimated present-value cost of nearly $165 billion.

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