In the parade of regulators that missed signals or made decisions they came to regret on the road to the current financial crisis, the Office of Thrift Supervision stands out. OTS is responsible for regulating thrifts, also known as savings and loans, which focus on mortgage lending. As the banks under OTS supervision expanded high-risk lending, the agency failed to rein in their destructive excesses. Instead, OTS adopted an aggressively deregulatory stance toward the mortgage lenders it regulated.

 

Banking Regulator Played Advocate Over Enforcer (by Binyamin Appelbaum and Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post)