home mortgage market. In 1983, the FSLIC's reserves for failures amounted to around $6 billion, whereas, according to Robinson (footnoted), the cost of paying off insured depositors in failed institutions would have been around $25 billion. Hence, regulators were forced into "forbearance"—allowing insolvent institutions to remain open—and to hope that they could grow out of their problems. Causes The Federal Reserve's interest rate policy A major factor contributing to the crisis was the Federal Reserve's response to rampant inflation, marked by Paul Volcker's speech of October 6, 1979, which resulted in a series of short-term interest rate increases. This led to a scenario whereby the short-term costs of funding to S&Ls were higher than the returns they were realizing from many of their mortgage loan portfolios. This situation could not be directly addressed because a large proportion of the loans were fixed-rate mortgages (a problem that is known as an asset-liability mismatch). As the Federal Reserve's policies continued to cause interest rates to rise, this placed even more pressure on S&Ls in late 1979 and into the 1980s, leading to an increased focus on high interest-rate transactions. As a result, fewer people borrowed money from S&Ls which further significantly lowered revenue so the institutions could not offset their losses. According to Zvi Bodie, professor of finance and economics at Boston University School of Management, writing in the St. Louis Federal Reserve Review, "asset-liability mismatch was a principal cause of the Savings and Loan Crisis". Deregulation In the early 1980s Congress passed two laws intended to deregulate the Savings and Loans industry, the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 signed by President Jimmy Carter and the Garn–St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982 signed by President Ronald Reagan. These laws allowed thrifts to offer a wider array of savings products (including adjustable-rate mortgages), but also significantly expanded their lending authority and reduced regulatory oversight. These changes were intended to allow S&Ls to "grow" out of their problems, and as such represented the first time that the government explicitly sought to influence S&L profits as opposed to promoting housing and home ownership. Other changes in thrift oversight included authorizing the use of more lenient accounting rules to report their financial condition, and the elimination of restrictions on the minimum numbers of S&L stockholders. Such policies, combined with an overall decline in regulatory oversight (known as forbearance), would later be