William Isaac

Who is William Isaac?

William M. "Bill" Isaac was the Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. He founded the regulatory consulting firm The Secura Group LLC which is now a part of FTI Consulting, Inc., a global consulting firm. Isaac sits on a number of corporate boards and speaks and writes regularly on financial and regulatory issues.

Isaac served as FDIC Chairman during the Reagan Administration from 1981 through 1985, a very tumultuous period in U.S. banking, which has recently been a point of comparison to the financial crisis of 2008. He was appointed to the three-member board of directors of the FDIC on March 16, 1978 by President Carter. Some of the major challenges during Isaac's tenure at the FDIC were sky-high interest rates; widespread bank failures and massive insolvencies in the thrift industry; the Garn–St. Germain Depository Institutions Act deregulating interest rates; a major recession in 1981-1982 with unemployment reaching 11 percent in 1983; the collapse of Continental Illinois, then the seventh largest bank in the US; the third world debt crisis; a depression in the agricultural sector; a collapse of the bubble in the energy sector; and a severe nationwide collapse in the real estate sector. Altogether during the crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s some 3,000 banks and thrifts failed, including many of the largest banks in the country and nine of the ten largest banks in Texas.