Janis Named President of Thrift League

Jay Janis, the nation’s top thrift regulator under President Jimmy Carter, was named Monday to head the California League of Savings Institutions.

Janis succeeds W. Dean Cannon Jr., who retires as president on Jan. 1.

The position gives Janis, 58, an influential industry platform. California thrifts are by far the largest in the country. Overall, the state’s 137 savings and loans hold one-third of all of the thrift industry’s assets nationwide.

In an interview, Janis said that one goal is to persuade people that the core of California’s savings and loan industry is healthy, despite industrywide problems and the failure of a number of large institutions.

“The weakest institutions have been weeded out. They are gone or are going,” Janis said.

Janis is a former director of Gibraltar Savings, a large thrift that was seized by regulators in 1989, and served as the thrift’s chairman during part of 1988. He also is a former director of Coast Savings Financial in Los Angeles, and was president of California Federal Savings, now CalFed Inc., in the early 1980s.

In 1979 and 1980, Janis served as chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, the nation’s chief regulatory agency for thrifts until the federal savings and loan bailout legislation in 1989. Regulation is now handled by the Office of Thrift Supervision.

One area that Janis may become more active in speaking out is the regulatory pressure thrifts are under. Janis said he believes that the regulatory pendulum has swung too far from being too lax to being too harsh.

“The fact of the matter is the regulatory climate is such that institutions are not going to take risks,” Janis said.