Generally, the New Deal legislation was successful, and the American banking system returned to health in the years following World War II. But it ran into difficulties again in the 1980s and 1990s -- in part because of social regulation. After the war, the government had been eager to foster home ownership, so it helped create a new banking sector -- the "savings and loan" (S&L) industry -- to concentrate on making long-term home loans, known as mortgages. Savings and loans faced one major problem: mortgages typically ran for 30 years and carried 79