Results tagged “washingtonmutual”

It was nearly a year ago we when witnessed the financial meltdown and takeover of 119-year old Washington Mutual. Banking FAIL! Flash forward to today, KING5-TV reports close to 100 former vice-presidents and other mid-to-senior level executives of the now-defunct WaMu have filed lawsuits against the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) seeking the government (or, perhaps ultimately the taxpayers) to pay up the millions they're owed.

Downplay the bad, highlight the good. Don't let your competitors know too much.That's how the sales game is played, and that's the strategy WaMu was trying to use when it asked the courts if it could refrain from disclosing how much it had cost them initially to purchase some of their assets, which are now again for sale. The feds saw right through the potential ploy, though, and the bank got a giant "denied" stamp on its request. The assets in question were declared not part of WaMu's shaken, shaken core, and therefore confidentiality wasn't going to help them against competitors. It certainly wasn't going to help them get their groove back.

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 impact on our local economy will be significant. From the Times article: "'It's pretty dire for Seattle,' said one former high-ranking executive." Brace yourselves--it's looking like a cold, lean winter ahead.

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.

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 3 Starbucks in Africa, and they're all in Egypt.) Manhattan has over 200 places to buy a venti cappuccino, and we all know how that town's major industry has been doing. And Gross does not have noticed, but we did: Can it be coincidence that WaMu, the Fortune 500 financial institution based in Starbucks' home town, has been wiped away like a foam mustache? We think not.

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 timeline of the assimilation process. Short version of the prediction: No big changes for about 6 months, but by the end of the year you'll be writing Chase-logoed checks and saying "good morning" to different faces at your local branch.

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 week. The only silver lining is that buyer "JPMorgan Chase will absorb at least $31 billion in losses that would normally have fallen to the F.D.I.C."

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 Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and HSBC. Good luck with that. WaMu closed today at $2.01, rising slightly in after hours trading.

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. If our local savings and loan goes woohoo, though, we know who to blame. Or not. Scientific consensus our ass.

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 battered portfolio much harder--any acquirer would have to put up extra capital against default--but incoming CEO Alan Fishman says he doesn't even want to sell anyway. So that's lucky.

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 did get a special from Jon Talton that recaps the WaMu/Killinger situation, and it's worth reading. If incoming head Alan Fishman's job is to work on WaMu's curb appeal, Seattle may be about to take a hard hit.

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.

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 CEO Kerry Killinger at the company's annual shareholder meeting late Tuesday. "We will get through this."

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?)

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!

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.

These are, you'd think, the pertinent numbers about Washington Mutual's 2007.

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."

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 customer, Krissy, manages to make having a barcode stapled to your head seem like a relatively pleasant experience. Her purse was stolen in October, she contacted WaMu to safeguard her accounts -- and she's still dealing with multiple screwups on their end, three months later.:

I wrote my letter, faxed it and mailed it, and naturally, heard nothing. Then on December 31st, I signed online to check up on things. And that very day, there was a whopping credit-reversal in my late checking account, putting it into the negative for hundreds of dollars. I. Was. PISSED. No scratch that -- I *am* pissed, as here I sit on January 9th, 2008 and STILL haven't gotten my credit back -- despite calling Risk Operations and being told "Oh how funny! We received your letter the same day as the credit reversal. Sorry 'bout that. But don't worry, once they process everything they should reissue the credit to the account."

Meanwhile, over on the New York Attorney General's site, Andrew Cuomo is impersonating a pitbull, if pitbulls knew how to file subpoenas:

“In order to fulfill their duty to consumers and investors, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac must ensure that Washington Mutual’s mortgages have not been corrupted by inflated appraisals,” said Attorney General Cuomo. “Our expanding investigation into the mortgage industry has uncovered that Washington Mutual improperly pressured appraisers to provide inflated values that best served the lender’s interest. Knowing this, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac cannot afford to continue buying Washington Mutual mortgages unless they are sure these loans are based on reliable and independent appraisals.”

According to his blog, NYTimes Op-Ed columnist and Princeton economics professor Paul Krugman is "sick as a dog" today, right before his visit to Town Hall tomorrow night. Krugman, like Bill Greider at Rolling Stone in the Reagan years, has taken up columnistic arms against the flow of disinformation from the White House. Who will tell the people? Krugman, that's who. (Actually Greider will too.)

Marty, who's journeying through Egypt, Greece, and Rome, found this out the hard way when his wallet was stolen in Athens. He called WaMu to report the loss, close the accounts, and move on -- when he ran into trouble:

Anyway, I then spent the better part of the morning trying to confirm that the cards were indeed closed. No one at Washington Mutual (WaMu) would help me. They kept shuffling me from department to department until I was cut off two different times. It was then that I realized that I was running out of minutes on my cell phone (The only way to recharge the minutes is to have a credit card). I tried making the overseas collect call they suggest, but it did not work on a cell phone, pay phone or even the home phone of a kind Greek family that has befriended us.

The American Institute of Architects asked 1800 Americans to name their favorite buildings in the US. After further refinement and surveying, the AIA compiled a list of the top 150 and released it on Wednesday.

Remember the giddy days of the early '90s when WaMu was the consumer-friendly alternative to big mean banks? (Yeah, we're looking at you, SeaFirst.) We knew those days were over, but now they're officially distant memories. CreditCard.org just gave our local banking behemoth a Lemon Award for Bad Banking:

Washington Mutual (NYSE:WM) gets the 2006 CreditCard.org Lemon Award for Bad Banking for taking first time late-payers to an interest rate over 31.9%. According to the terms:

Continue reading "WaMu Is Usury Friendly"

Seattle-based Fortune 500 companies have been getting a lot of attention from Consumerist lately -- first Starbucks, now WaMu:

Washington Mutual Inc. says it moved tellers out from behind counters to encourage "friendly customer service in a welcoming retail environment," a design it proudly patented.

Continue reading "Bad Architectural Design Leads to Mugging"

FORTUNE magazine recently released its 2006 list of the 500 largest companies in America.

The boys putting together the new WaMu tower across from Benaroya Hall had some trouble yesterday when a beam fell and injured three. The details are slow in coming, but somehow a beam that was designated as part of the flooring escaped the grasp of a crain that was holding it in place. One of the injured men is in critical condition at Harborview. The Washington Department of Labor and Industries is, of course, hastily dispatched investigators to the site.

Animal lover? Music lover? Both? No matter what, Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo has you covered, as they've just announced this summer's ZooTunes lineup!