25: The Big Bang: The origin of modern real estate and banking

In this latest episode of Onward, Fundrise CEO Ben Miller and co-host Cardiff Garcia give us a tour of the economic landscape that was once the status quo: a world where local lending institutions called S&Ls — or thrifts — were the primary way individuals saved for and financed home ownership. However, due to a confluence of events, including rocketing inflation similar to the past 18 months’, S&Ls found themselves in a period of acute insolvency. As Ben and Cardiff explain, a series of regulatory blunders, bailouts, and bad actors then caused the crisis to deepen, eventually leading to a total shutdown of the S&L framework, forcing our financial system to perform a hard reset. In the process, the long financial era that had begun in the 1930s came to an end, and our modern era began. Out of the Savings and Loan Crisis arose some of the most basic pillars of today’s economic system, fundamental to how we now think about and handle money, including national banks, banks as mortgage providers, public REITs, and the entire industry of private equity real estate. Ultimately, the Savings and Loan Crisis was so instrumental to shaping our monetary systems today that to truly understand modern finance, we need to look back at that explosive event that set the trajectory our economy still follows.

Have questions or feedback about this episode? Drop us a note at [email protected].

Onward is hosted by Ben Miller, co-founder and CEO of Fundrise, and Cardiff Garcia, co-founder of Bazaar Audio and host of the economics-focused podcast The New Bazaar (after spending many years as the co-creator and co-host of NPR's The Indicator podcast).

Podcast production by The Podcast Consultant. Music by Seaplane Armada.

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