Washington Mutual was a bank that desperately deserved to fail. Even a year after its demise, WaMu is still making the headlines. One example is is the CNN Money article below...
WaMu: The Forgotten Bank Failure
The biggest-ever bank collapse didn't lead to chaos, but Americans will pay the price for its unsound lending for years to come.
Washington Mutual is long gone, but its lax lending could haunt us for years.
The Seattle-based institution collapsed in the largest-ever U.S. bank failure last September. WaMu ran out of cash after business customers, unnerved by the implosion of Lehman Brothers, withdrew their uninsured deposits.
After the chaos surrounding Lehman's demise, WaMu was put to rest with little fuss. Regulators seized the nation's sixth-biggest bank on a Thursday night — a departure from the customary Friday — and sold it to JPMorgan Chase for $1.9 billion.
The move wiped out WaMu's 56,000 shareholders of record and left bondholders nursing billions of dollars in losses. But the WaMu deal spared the federal deposit insurance fund and thus was, unlike so many federal actions over the past year, an unalloyed positive for taxpayers.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Even a year later - WaMu failure still in the headlines
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Interesting Commentary from Andrew Lo
The link below goes to a video with Andrew Lo with some interesting commentary about how the current financial crisis altered the underpinnings of investment diversification. Andrew LO is an award winning MIT economist.
http://www.investmentnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=wealthtrack
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