WASHINGTON -- It's 742 down and two to go for the agency charged with disposing of the nation's dead savings and loans.
Five years after it was created, the Resolution Trust Corp. is winding down. It now expects to dispose of its two remaining thrifts by the end of the year.
The last of the lot are Gaithersburg, Md.-based Standard Federal Savings Bank and Newark-based Carteret Savings Bank.
The RTC expects to sell Standard Federal later this month, and to find a buyer for Carteret soon after.
"We've gotten a lot of interest in both of the institutions," an RTC spokeswoman said. "By the end of 1994, we should have these two things wrapped up."
In October 1992, the RTC took over Standard Federal, which then had $1.83 billion in assets.
At the end of July, Standard had $1.28 billion in assets and $115 million in deposits. It has 10 branches in Maryland.
Standard has always been a big mortgage banking operation -- not a traditional thrift.
As a result, it holds many purchased mortgage servicing rights, and has unusually large asset holdings compared with its deposit levels.
The RTC took over Carteret in December 1992, when it had $5.22 billion in assets.
At the end of September, it was down to $2.39 billion in assets and $1.47 billion in deposits.
Carteret had 39 branches in Florida and New Jersey. At the end of October, the RTC sold off the nine Florida branches, but the bulk of the institution remains to be sold.
Both institutions still have some deposit accounts with balances of more than $100,000. Amounts over $100,000 are uninsured.
While the RTC could not provide exact figures for the amount of uninsured deposits, a spokeswoman said they are not expected to total more than half of 1% of all deposits at either Carteret or Standard Federal.
The agency still has assets worth $40.2 billion to unload. That property used to belong to failed thrifts, but landed in RTC hands when acquirers of failed institutions refused to take it or when the agency permanently closed the insolvent institutions.
The RTC is set to shut down at the end of 1995. It has already begun the process of folding its offices into the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
It will stop taking any newly failed thrifts sometime between January and June, at the Thrift Depositor Protection Oversight Board's discretion.
