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......

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......

......

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......

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......

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......

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......

Last week we mentioned that Seattle's WaMu was accused of colluding in a appraisal-inflation scheme. Today, Bloomberg reports that the fall-out has fallen: "Washington Mutual fell $4.04, or 17 percent, to $20.19 at 1:15 p.m. in composite trading on the New York Stock Exchange, the biggest decline since the stock market crashed on Oct. 19, 1987." As a result, significant bets are being made:The risk of Washington Mutual defaulting on its debt soared to the......

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.) Sick or not, Krugman will be at Town Hall to......

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......

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. A grand total of two Seattle buildings made the list: at #108, the gorgeous but metroartificial Seattle Public Library; and at #135, Safeco Field. Nowhere to be found: the viaduct, the EMP, Smith Tower, Washington Mutual Tower, Rainier Tower, Qwest......

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......

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. WaMu customer Jaime Quiroz Sanchez, a real estate agent and landlord from Lancaster, says the coffeehouse approach to banking got him robbed at knifepoint of $20,805. That's the opening of......

FORTUNE magazine recently released its 2006 list of the 500 largest companies in America. At first glance, not much has changed among our local representatives: Costco (#28) is still the largest company in the state. Microsoft (#48) is the second largest, and Bill Gates credits his nearly paperless office for his amazing productivity. Washington Mutual (#99) is the biggest of 5 Seattle-based companies on the list, followed by Amazon.com (#272), Nordstrom (#293), Starbucks (#338),......

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......

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!...