The thrift cleanup agency is running for the wire.
The Resolution Trust Corp., which was loaded down with 744 thrifts that failed during the S&L crisis, now has just nine left to sell. It plans to get rid of them by the end of next month, a spokeswoman said.
The nine remaining thrifts had a combined $19.37 billion of assets when they were taken over.
Those last nine S&Ls being run by the agency in its conservatorship program are the most visible parts of the wreckage of the thrift crisis. But the agency is also making headway in selling the assets and subsidiaries left over when healthy institutions bought the failed, whole thrifts.
The RTC is down to the bottom of its asset barrel "and the last thrift in our inventory will soon be history," said RTC spokesman Stephen J. Katsanos.
The agency is winding down because Congress mandated that it stop taking failed institutions from thrift regulators by the middle of next year. After that, all thrifts that fail will be resolved by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.'s thrift insurance fund.
No thrifts have failed so far this year, and the Office of Thrift Supervision expects few failures through the end of the year.
The RTC will have until the end of next year to sell its holdings of assets that used to belong to failed thrifts. Any assets not sold by then will be transferred to the FDIC's Depositor and Asset Services Division, which will continue the process of selling them.
The 744 RTC thrifts had combined assets of $461 billion when they failed - although their liabilities surpassed that figure. The RTC had sold nearly 90% of those assets by May, the latest figures available.
But the assets left to sell may stick to the RTC like peanut butter. While the agency typically got 97% of book value for the assets it sold in 1989 and 1990, that figure has dropped to 60% for those sold this year.
Assets the agency calls "hard to sell" comprised 71% of the RTC's inventory at the end of May. Of the assets left, 31% can be found in Texas, 21% in California and 11% in Florida.
A good chunk of the $45.6 billion of assets the RTC has left to sell include subsidiaries and joint ventures held by thrifts when they failed.
The RTC has no way to track how many subsidiaries have been turned over to it since 1989 because it did not have a tracking system for them until 18 months ago.
But in 1992, the RTC held 4,290 subsidiaries and joint ventures with $10 billion of assets.
Most acquirers refused to take those parts of .the failed institutions off the RTC's hands, so the agency has been selling them off with other assets acquirers have refused.
