Deregulation is a laughable term applied to this situation. Your chronology is a superb documentation of how the government has been squatting on the banking free market like a hippo on a hummingbird. Practically every third word describes dealing with some government regulation or restriction, often arbitrary and set at a politicians whim, attempting to steer and control a banking system that should be largely self-balancing.

Most of these regulations, a legacy of the Depression, were created with the best of intentions: to prevent bank failures and the loss of savings. However, banks are businesses like any other, and creating various artificial floors and safety nets under them that do not permit them to fail or self-correct, sets the system up for abuses, incompetence, and overextensions which eventually culminated in the S & L crisis. We're lucky it wasn't worse.

In other words, the S & L industry acted like any other "socialized" industry with access to taxpayer funds, and screwed up royally without any significant consequences--the old saying of "I want my success to be free market, but my failure to be socialized" (unfortunately, a common attitude among many businessmen today.) I wasn't surprised by the outcome. Why was anyone else?