WaMu Down $3.33 Billion in Quarter's Subprime Poker Game

Bloomberg is reporting that WaMu lost $3.33 billion dollars in the second quarter of 2008. This news may be overshadowed by Wachovia's $8.9 billion whoopsie! but after raising $12 billion last year, Washington Mutual can't take too many more hits like this. Still-not-fired WaMu CEO Kerry Killinger won't get his bonus, it turns out, surprising no one except for the WaMu board that initially wanted to give it to him.

Analysts say WaMu was heavily into lower-grade mortgages, and that bleeding has yet to stop. One predicts total WaMu losses between $9 and $10 billion. The same Bloomberg story notes that:

In California, home to half of the company's loans, one in every 192 householders was in some stage of foreclosure last month, 2.6 times the national average, according to RealtyTrac Inc. (...) U.S. foreclosure filings rose 53 percent in June from a year earlier, with one in every 501 U.S. households in some stage of the process, according to RealtyTrac.

WaMu's stock, which had tumbled to $3.23 recently, closed up slightly at $5.82.

Photo courtesy of Seattlest Flickr poolster scarequotes. Put your WaMu photo in the pool today, more bad news could be on the way!