ABSTRACT
Major alterations occurred in the interest rates and other attributes of the deposit accounts offered by commercial banks in the United States. The decade of the 1970s was characterized by a combination of severe distortions in the fields of energy, prices, economic activity, and fiscal operations that put an extraordinary amount of pressure on the volume and terms of credit transactions. Concomitantly, the inflationary path of prices was provoking a corresponding movement in interest rates. Lenders and borrowers came to recognize that even the soaring nominal interest rates were, if deflated by a price index, moderate or even negative in real terms. In the preamble to the portion of the 1980 act that deregulates the rates on deposits, the Congress stated its view on the damaging effects of interest ceilings in different, less precise, and more florid language than that of the Hunt Report, but the broad conclusions were similar.
