The plan, which is still being hammered out with Congress, raises a number of red flags. First and foremost, unlike the process then, there’s no accompanying re-regulation of the financial services industry.

Read Treasury's Fact Sheet on Bailout

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"We educated ourselves enough — we were able to build a competent structure,” says Donald Riegle, who chaired the Senate’s Banking Committee at the time. "We built a legislative package that worked quite well. Firrea (Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act) included creation of a regulator as well as the RTC.”

Though history shows the S&L crisis was resolved successfully, there was considerable skepticism about the FIRREA law, the new regulator it created, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the bailout entity, the Resolution Trust Corp., at the time of their creation.

It also wound up costing less than many expected.

In the current rescue plan, the absence of regulatory reform is no small matter, given the size of the problem and the complexity of investment instruments today.

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“It isn't just a question of the clean up,” says Riegle, now chairman of APCO Worldwide's government relations team. “You have to figure out how this happened and how you keep it from happening again. What are the standards for the future?"

The regulatory and oversight shortcomings also illustrate the federal government’s patchwork approach to the problem prior to the more draconian bailout package. The Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae-Freddie-Mac, AIGcases were also handled differently.

Former S&L regulator and White House economist Lawrence White says that in the current environment if federal money is going to be at risk then the government needs regulatory tools to limit exposure, what he calls a safety-and-soundness regime for investment banks.

“Minimal capital requirements, limitations on activities that may be too risky, managerial competency requirements, and clear powers of receivership for an insolvent institution,” says White, now a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business.

In the S&L crisis, the government had those powers, before and after the bailout legislation, and are considered a key part of the success.