Professor William Black:

The most parallel crisis to the Irish crisis, of which I am aware, is the savings and loan debacle. There are many differences, obviously, but it is the closest in that it was same in both cases and it was a bit different from building societies. Because of deregulation in 1982, savings and loan institutions were allowed to be essentially universal banks, as the Senator used that parlance, and so they could take equity positions, and unlimited equity positions in the case of the California institutions. They followed the recipe that I talked about and did so not only in residential lending but in commercial lending, and they produced a very large bubble. Our bubbles were regional but we are a much larger country geographically, and those bubbles were of similar magnitude to Ireland, but regional, and compared to our national economy, it was never anywhere near as large.