The Seattle Times reports that JP Morgan will lay off as many as 3,000 WaMu employees in the Seattle area, cutting the local WaMu workforce to just under a third of its former glory. Layoffs begin this week, and by December 1--in the thick of the holiday shopping season--all of the decisions will have been made about who stays and who goes. This doesn't come as a surprise, but the numbers are breathtaking and the......

At some point in the near future, we know we'll read a long, detailed explanation of every false step and bad decision that wound up destroying a 119-year-old Seattle institution. Our basic understanding is that WaMu made a lot of bad investments in crappy subprime mortgages. And with the benefit of hindsight, we know just how bad those investments were. Until that long, detailed, possibly Pulitzer-worthy article appears (who's writing this? John Cook? Mudede? Van......

Daniel Gross at Slate has a theory: "The higher the concentration of expensive, nautically themed, faux-Italian-branded Frappuccino joints in a country's financial capital, the more likely the country is to have suffered catastrophic financial losses." Australia, the UK, and South Korea embraced Starbucks and are now facing financial crises. Egypt, Brazil, and Italy have few if any Starbucks outlets, and their banks are doing relatively well. (Trivia fact gleaned from Gross' article: There are only......

The local blogosphere has fastened on the news that WaMu's former president and COO Stephen Rotella is asking $6.25 million for his 1909 Capitol Hill mansion--the Stranger's investigative reporter Dan Savage bicycled by to produce a photo of the real estate in question. Ironically, the asking price exhibits the kind of crazy thinking that sank WaMu; Rotella bought the place for $3.78 million just three years ago. Now, during a major market downturn, he apparently......

We encourage you to be a tourist in your own town, but don't buy the souvenirs. "Space Needle Souvenirs" by Nerds Eye View. WaMu really can't catch a break. The Belltowner and PhinneyWood report that their neighborhood WaMu branches were robbed over the weekend. Mid Beacon Hill explores "cheap South End fun," including a place that should be on the hipster street-of-dreams, and the Museum of Communications. Being a tourist in your own city is......

On this afternoon's Fast Money, the CNBC show for the ritalin-munching financial types, a segment of the show was dedicated to the Royal Bank of Scotland, which is looking less and less regal with each passing day. Today, the stock was down 44% and now trades at less than 2 bucks. (Sound familiar?) When asked if the stock was worth the risk as a buy, commentator Jeff Macke responded, "RBS is nothing more than WaMu......

We switched most of our banking over to USAA last year (WaMu was pretty good for a bank, but USAA is stellar). We've still got an account at WaMu, though. As recommended, we'll continue to use WaMu's website as usual, and we're not really worried about the security of our well-under-$100,000 deposit. But we were curious about what's going to happen when at our local branches. Consumerist found a banking insider to provide a one-year......

Marketwatch has a good FAQ for Washington Mutual clients wondering if their money is still there. Short answer: it's all good. Unless you're a shareholder. Shareholders are screwed--officially, whenever what's left of WaMu declares bankruptcy. Alan Fishman, WaMu's 3-week CEO, is not screwed, though it may be difficult for him to find another job that pays $18 million per month. WaMu depositors precipitated the bank's failure by withdrawing $16.7 billion in a little over a......

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JPMorgan Chase is holding a conference call at 6:15 p.m. today, and the expected topic is its purchase of (part of) Washington Mutual. WaMu was frenetically batting its eyelashes at any suitor within bidding distance, especially with news of a bailout in the offing, potentially keeping WaMu's toxic mortgage holdings from being a dead loss. Bloomberg says that federal regulators decided to press the issue, and seized the bank's assets today. JPMorgan Chase is apt......

We've been so nervous about what's going to happen to our local savings and loan, Washington Mutual. And then today, we hear that you're thinking of just pulling more billions of dollars out of nowhere (Why not? The nation's already in severe debt!) to cover the debts of our failing financial institutions. While you're at it, could you also pay off our debts? You can start with our student loans, since the money is actually......

It seems like only days ago that we were being told that WaMu's incoming CEO, Alan Fishman was ready to turn lead into gold: "I do think I have the skills to take it to the next level." But the next level sounds like drumming up curb appeal for the beleaguered savings and loan. Today the New York Times says that WaMu's shopping for buyers. Goldman Sachs is playing matchmaker, and has sounded out Wells......

We know how bad this whole crashing economy is. Really, we do. But every cloud has a silver lining, and we're pretty sure the sparkle you can see just past today's bankrupt financial giants and tanked WAMU stock is increased transit ridership translating into more routes and added runs on existing routes so you don't have to drive (or pay for gas) anymore. With ridership nearly 7 percent higher than this time last year, King......

Washington Mutual stock closed down today (why haven't we made that into auto-text yet?), at $2.01, which is also the price of this Murder City Devils DVD on eBay. The market closed down 500. The Fed let the market put a bullet in the head of Lehman Brothers over the weekend, and the Merrill Lynch bull was sold to the Bank of America slaughterhouse, so no one's in the mood to buy WaMu's pigs-in-a-poke shares.......

WaMu's bargain-basement stock dropped almost 30% today--it's currently rallied to $2.60 from a low of $2.30--after a 20% fall yesterday. So the market doesn't seem impressed with the WaMu Board's tardy ejection of Kerry Killinger from the executive suite. Bloomberg says: "Credit-default swaps on WaMu are now trading at a price that implies a greater than 90 percent chance the company will default within five years." New accounting rules make selling WaMu and its subprime-mortgage......

At long last, struggling Washington Mutual acceded to the inevitable and showed CEO Kerry Killinger the door. Thanks to our local newspapers' canny investments in business coverage, we're hearing about immensely important local news the day after the Wall Street Journal reported on Killinger's exit. The Seattle Times is running an AP story, and the P-I made its whole business staff (i.e., Bill Virgin) come in over the weekend and write something up. The Times......

It's not a good day for a bank when the Seattle Times story on the crater your stock fell into begins like this:Your money is safe if its in an institution insured by the FDIC. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. covers up to $100,000 per institution, and even may provide additional coverage for IRAs in those banks.Washington Mutual had to do something banks hate to do, which is explain publicly how much money there is......

When we read that the Seattle Times had a large feature on the top paid CEOs in the Pacific Northwest, we wondered what the point was. Everyone knows Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Jeff Bezos—all local CEOs—are richer than God. And it turns out everyone, this Seattlest included, is wrong. According to the Times piece, the best paid local CEO in 2007 was James Voelker, who runs Bellevue's InfoSpace—a company we've never heard of.......

If it seems like everything at WAMU is dying, that’s because it is. The stock fell to its lowest price since 1995 at just $7.53 a share last week, sending confidence in the struggling bank back into the sewer. To add insult to injury, the locally-based Falcon Research Group also announced the baby falcons living atop the WAMU Tower are all dead. The baby falcon mortality comes as a mystery to scientists, but shareholders......

Business Week scores yesterday's WaMu shareholders meeting, "activists three, bank zero." The Seattle Times settles for "contentious," while the P-I has this leading question for CEO Kerry Killinger from Lee Lannoye, a shareholder and former WaMu executive vice president: "You have destroyed the company--why are you not being held accountable?" MSN Money captures the executive team in action at Benaroya Hall like so:"I just want people to calm down and have a little faith," said......

Subprime mortgages were like steroids for lenders; they ballooned up. Now Washington Mutual is shrinking back down to a regular size. It's exiting the wholesale lending arena, and shuttering all 186 of its stand-alone home loan centers. That means layoffs of 3,000 employees, even though WaMu will still be offering home loans through its retail branches. The AP has the full restructuring story. (Wonder how many of those employees have WaMu mortgages?) It's likely that......

WaMu is like a free public water fountain these days. Except instead of water, it's all bad news. And it's not free, it's costing billions. But it is highly public! Last week there was a rumor of a buy-out floating around that lifted the stock slightly. But then JPMorgan Chase & Co. bought Bear Stearns and everyone went, Oh, that's what the buy-out rumor was and WaMu's subprime-mortgage-battered stock plunged again. Moody's Investor Service has......

Wall Street is a terrific place. If we wanted to be worth more money in desperate circumstances, we'd probably have to come up with more than a rumor. But not when it comes to the stock market. The P-I reports WaMu's stock rose almost 20% Tuesday on rumors that Goldman Sachs or Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway was in a shopping mood. Of course, that 20% sounds like more than the $1.89/share it turned out to be.......

These are, you'd think, the pertinent numbers about Washington Mutual's 2007. Stock price at start of 2007: 45.40 Stock price at end of 2007: 13.07 But apparently the 71% drop in stock price is not among the criteria by which Washington Mutual judges its executives, because those executives will get six-figure bonuses for last year, reports Drew DeSilver of the Seattle Times. Chief Operating Officer Stephen Rotella gets $912,000 for chiefly operating WaMu to its......

We're not actually gloating over WaMu's travails -- there are too many lives involved likely to be disrupted. But there's no denying the majesty with which its home loan mortgage unit steered into the subprime iceberg. The Seattle Times headline reads: "WaMu posts first quarterly loss in a decade," thanks to a $1.78 billion writedown by the home loaners. Oddly, the bigger news -- "For the full year, WaMu reported a $67 million loss —......

Motley Fool's unwrapped their crystal balls -- and they don't see good things for some of Seattle's biggest companies. They're "unleashing our venom on some of the stocks that your fellow Fools think will tank in 2008." Three of their worst stocks for 2008: Washington Mutual, Amazon.com, and Starbucks. Jim Mueller's evisceration makes WaMu look like the worst of the trio: There are a lot of questions without any answers, let alone reasonable estimates. *......

Once upon a time, WaMu was known for having great customer service (especially for a bank). Then they became known for their amusing commercials about their great customer service, and still being pretty decent (for a bank). Now they're known for losing their shirt in the housing bubble. We have no idea what their customer service is like, because we long ago left them for WSECU and USAA. But a nightmarish account by one......

Could we be any vaguer? No, but that doesn't mean there's still not any reason to get excited. With In Rainbows making its formal debut atop the Billboard charts, Radiohead is set to cover North America in two tour legs, one prior to and one following their recently announced European summer tour (June 6 in Dublin through July 8 in Berlin). There's no exact dates or venues just yet, but the band has confirmed......

We knew WaMu had run into some fiscal turbulence (and some legal headaches). We imagine money's tight. But we can't believe it's come to this. A customer service employee says a memo went out that WaMu is "going to stop providing us plastic cutlery, hot chocolate, creamer, and anything but regular tea." Granted, it's environmentally friendlier to use real cutlery instead of plastic, but when that teller's smile wavers as they enumerate the benefits......

Time magazine claims, "You can't swing a dead cat this time of year without hitting a Top 10 List." Never one to waste a perfectly good dead cat, we decided to take a swing and create a Top Random-Number Shows Seattlest Saw This Year. And now, without any further ado, here's how your favorite bloggers broke down the year: According to Dante, everything else pared in comparison to Daft Punk at WaMu Theater 7/29/07. OMFG!!!!!!!!!!!!!......