Bye Bye WaMu. We hardly knew ya!

[lsanderson]

September 26, 2008

Government Seizes WaMu and Sells Some Assets

By ERIC DASH and ANDREW ROSS SORKIN

Washington Mutual, the giant lender that came to symbolize the excesses of the mortgage boom, was seized by federal regulators on Thursday night in the largest bank failure in American history.

Regulators simultaneously brokered an emergency sale of virtually all of Washington Mutual to JPMorgan Chase. The remainder of WaMu, the nation’s largest savings and loan, will be operated by the government. Shareholders and some bondholders will be wiped out. WaMu deposits are guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation up to the $100,000 limit for each account. WaMu customers are unlikely to be affected.

Link

Shamelessly Stolen from erikvolson

Comments

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Gee, I _hope_ WaMu customers aren't affected -- I'd stand to lose c. $30,000.00 (not covered because it's over the FDIC limit), and possibly about $25,000.00 more if the CD & Checking are considered to be in the same Account. (I'm assuming that the FDIC won't also go bust.) *sigh*

Tomorrow, I plan to drop by the local WaMu branch and (try to) cash my pension checks -- rather than deposit them, though this is a month that was scheduled.

WoW

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

I hope they cover it.

Re: WoW

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

So do I, of course -- and the FDIC has, I understand, been going well beyond the 100K limit, for personal accounts. If they don't ... the other 2/3 of my income is from (hopefully) safe County and SS Pensions, and should still provide more income than I usually spend. (The WaMu accounts are so large (by my standards) because my expenditures have been substantially less than income for several decades. It might (or might not) have been better to have invested in The Stock Market, but I trusted that even less, and have moral objections to it.)

BTW: Obviously, I don't share the common perception that it's not polite to talk about (one's) money, and kinda want to get in on the ground floor in the unfortunate event of this being just the beginning of a long series of Personal Economic Disaster Accounts from the kind of middle-class individuals who include most of the people I know.

WaMu

[jdonat.livejournal.com]

mdonat is also concerned about this.

You're fine

1. JPMC (known to the rest of us as Chase) has taken over WaMu. They bought it outright from the Office of Thrift Supervision for 1.9b.

2. if for some reason, JPMC hadn't bought out WaMu, the FDIC would have guaranteed your deposits $100k/per account. This didn't happen -good thing too, cause the FDIC would be the next agency at the $$ trough.

At some time in the future, WaMu branches will become Chase ones.

Re: WaMu

[jdonat.livejournal.com]

ah. I didn't see that some stuff could have been over the 100k limit. Well, that 'could' have been a problem, but it appears that the IndyMac customers who had deposits over 100k/account will be covered.

But, again, JPMC now owns WaMu.

Re: WaMu

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Yup, and all is safe ... unless Chase/Morgan turns out to have over-extended themselves. But I've long avoided Chase (as having engaged in even-more-morally-reprehensible-than-most business practices), and expect to be shopping-around for someone else to handle that portion of my savings.

Re: WaMu

[jdonat.livejournal.com]

Well, there is that. Chase does have a bad habit of being idiots. But, who? BofA? Maybe some smaller bank... but there you run into issues of lotsa fees if you travel at all.

Sheesh.

Re: WaMu

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Never again BoA, thank you very much. (That's from a combination of fairly recent Experience and an acquired memory of how BoA (then Bank of Italy) became One Of The Big Guys -- by instantly foreclosing on property-guaranteed loans to farmers in Caifornia during the (previous) Great Depression, whereas other banks mostly attempted to help their customers survive. (There are still a few (now elderly) children of the affected farmers who spit on the sidewalk in front of the doors to the BoA here in Covina, just like their fathers used to do.)

Of course I'll diversify, and probably keep a checking-account in some large bank, especially for travel purposes. But then, I'm such an old geeezer/fuddy-duddy that I've never used an ATM.