The Lost Bank
The Story of Washington Mutual-The Biggest Bank Failure in American History
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
An award-winning reporter chronicles the calamitous story of Washington Mutual, the single-largest bank failure in American history, in this fast-paced, compelling, and gripping saga of greed and excess.
During the most dizzying days of the financial crisis, Washington Mutual, a bank with hundreds of billions of dollars in its coffers, suffered a crippling bank run. The story of its final, brutal collapse in the autumn of 2008, and its controversial sale to JPMorgan Chase, is an astonishing account of how one bank lost itself to greed and mismanagement, and how the entire financial industry—even the entire country—lost its way as well.
Written as compellingly as the finest fiction, The Lost Bank introduces readers to the regulators and the bankers, the home buyers and the lenders who together created the largest bank failure in American history. The result is a magisterial and gripping account of the incredible rise and the precipitous collapse of not only an institution but of trust, fortunes, and the marketplaces for risk across the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hubris and greed break the bank in this absorbing saga of the housing bubble. In her first book, Wall Street Journal reporter Grind chronicles the rise of Washington Mutual from a sleepy Seattle-based thrift to America's biggest savings and loan bank, its reckless plunge into the can't-lose subprime mortgage market, and its 2008 failure. As the honest, avowedly "nice" WaMu succumbs to the lure of easy money, an almost Shakespearean boardroom melodrama unfolds, featuring vivid personalities like Kerry Killinger, WaMu's conquering hero-turned-vacillating nebbishy CEO, and Jamie Dimon, the ruthless JPMorgan leader who swallowed WaMu. (Grind raises disturbing questions about how JPMorgan benefited from the FDIC's forcing a possibly salvageable WaMu into receivership.) Even more revealing are the bit players the WaMu salespeople peddling extortionate adjustable rate mortgages to impecunious borrowers who didn't understand what they were signing. Grind pens a lucid, entertaining guide to the delusions and frauds powering the debacle, from Fed chief Alan Greenspan's rose-tinted economic forecasts down to the falsified documents that put people with no income, assets, or perhaps even pulses into mortgages they could never repay. Hers is one of the best accounts yet of WaMu's demise and of the Great Crash as it played out on a human scale.
