In L. William Seidman’s Full Faith and Credit: the Great S&L Debacle and Other Washington Sagas, a novel I read, Seidman tells his audience what he experienced during his time in Washington D.C. during President Richard Nixon, President Gerald Ford, President Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush’s terms in office. He gives insight through various details about how he obtained is positions and how he played a key role in keepin the S&L disaster hidden from the American people where it potentially could have caused chaos at the time. Seidman was the chairman of the Fedeal Deposit Insurance Corporation for some time as well and is author to a couple of other novels, Competitiveness—the Executive’s Guide to Success (1989) and Productivity the American Advantage (1990). Seidman also tells…show more content… Seidman references S&L with the S&L disaster that happened during the 1970s. He says, “They gambled that short-term interest rates would always be lower than long-term mortgage rates, and until the great inflation of the 1970s, they won that bet” (Seidman 1993, pg. 21). L. William Seidman also says that “the S&Ls are in trouble unless the pay higher rates, and then they are in double trouble because they are paying more for money on deposit than they are receiving in interest income” (Seidman 1993, pg. 21). He later says that the S&L and inflation problem was solved because of budget cuts performed by Ford’s vetoes of numerous spending bills (Seidman 1993, pg. 22). Seidman then says that the S&L problems were fixed for a short period of time. Until President Jimmy Carter’s presidency, the S&L crisis seemed to be extinct. It was sparked again by deficits and real estate prices and interest rates. Seidman says that the S&Ls were never “cured by the Ford administration because S&Ls still borrowed short and lent long” (Seidman 1993, pg.22). Seidman tells how they diagnosed the true problem with the S&L when he
