It's getting to the point that even the powerful Senator Charles Schumer is wondering why the Obama Administration didn't re-open RTC on January 20, 2009 for this very purpose.
The RTC didn't buy up bad mortgages, because there were no bad mortgages. There weren't even bad S&L's, until the Congress made the S&L's business model untenable.
The RTC mortgages had been made based on reasonable house evaluations and made to folks with reasonable credit ratings. Neither is true for todays troubled mortgages.
The S&L's held mortagages at 4%, while paying depositors 3%. But Volker needed to kill inflation, and in the process the interest rate the S&L's needed to pay went well above 4%.
Then the S&L's went into junk bonds to try and get something paying high interests to cover the problem. That worked until the government forced them to sell the junk bonds, which of course meant a fire sale, and fire sale prices.
Nothing the S&L's held were bad, not the mortgages, nor the junk bonds. They all paid off. The only thing bad was the business model or giving long term loans based on short term deposits. This business model was always at risk if the interest they had to pay on short-term deposits went up.
The S&L's business model was a creation of the the government, to help folks buy homes. The higher interest rates was a product of the government, a successful attempt to kill inflation. The necessity to sell off the junk bonds was an idiotic Congressional jab at Wall Street, that backfired at the usual grand Federal level of collateral damage.
Let's not forget that Schmuck played a leading role in the banking system fiasco.