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[MP3CD audiobook format in vinyl case.]
[Read by Traber Burns]
During the most dizzying days of the financial crisis, Washington Mutual, a bank with hundreds of billions of dollars in its coffers, suffered a crippling bank run. The story of its final, brutal collapse in the autumn of 2008, and its controversial sale to JPMorgan Chase, is an astonishing account of how one bank lost itself to greed and mismanagement and how the entire financial industry -- and even the entire country -- lost its way as well.
Kirsten Grind's The Lost Bank is a magisterial and gripping account of these events, tracing the cultural shifts, the cockamamie financial engineering, and the hubris and avarice that made this incredible story possible. The men and women who become the central players in this tragedy -- the regulators and the bankers, the home buyers and the lenders, the number crunchers and the shareholders -- are heroes and villains, perpetrators and victims, often switching roles with one another as the drama unfolds.
Reporting for the Puget Sound Business Journal, Grind covered the story from the beginning. It was a story set far from the epicenters of finance and media, happening largely in places such as the suburban homes of central California and the office buildings of Seattle, but the clarity and depth of Grind's work earned her many awards, including being named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Gerald Loeb Award. She takes readers into boardrooms and bedrooms, revealing the power struggles that pitted regulators at the Office of Thrift Supervision and the FDIC against one another and the predatory negotiations of investment bankers and lawyers who enriched themselves during the bank's rise and then devoured the decimated bank in its final days.
Written as compellingly as the finest fiction, The Lost Bank makes it clear that the collapse of Washington Mutual was not just the largest bank failure in American history. It is a story of talismanic qualities, reflecting the incredible rise and the precipitous collapse of not only an institution but of trust, fortunes, and the marketplaces for risk across the world.
- Sales Rank: #4104119 in Books
- Published on: 2012-07-01
- Formats: Audiobook, Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.50" h x .60" w x 5.30" l, .20 pounds
- Running time: 50400 seconds
- Binding: MP3 CD
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, June 2012: The collapse of Washington Mutual in September 2008 was the largest bank failure in U.S. history and a symbolic casualty of America’s unfolding financial crisis. Wall Street Journal reporter Kristen Grind provides a fascinating fly-on-the-boardroom-wall account of the bank’s final hours, and takes us back through the history of what started as a quirky, familial savings and loan and became a byword for America’s financial malfunction. This is no tedious, dry retelling of a story we’ve heard hundreds of times in the last four years—Grind masterfully explains even the most complex financial concepts and has a natural talent for ferreting out tiny but humanizing details. Grind has already received numerous awards for her coverage of WaMu’s mighty fall, and The Lost Bank stands beside The Big Short and Too Big to Fail as required reading for students of the Great Recession. --Juliet Disparte
Review
''The transformation of Washington Mutual from folksy community lender to reckless 2000-branch behemoth is one of the epic stories of American finance . . . Grind tells this boom-bust story without lapsing into melodrama or malice, and her tale is all the more powerful for that.'' --Sebastian Mallaby, New York Times bestselling author
''Kirsten Grind has written a first-rate accounting of the spectacular collapse of Washington Mutual and how behemoth JPMorgan Chase picked over its carcass. Thanks to Grind's winning narrative, what was previously one of the less-well known financial disasters of September 2008 is now fully -- and entertainingly -- explicated.'' --William D. Cohan, New York Times bestselling author
''What a marvelous book this is, so well-reported and so well-told by a writer who really threw herself into telling her story. And what an incredible tale that turns out to be . . . The Lost Bank would be a joy to read if not for the Greek tragedy that unspools vividly and painfully before your eyes. A first-rate job by a first-rate journalist.'' --Gary Rivlin, award-winning author of Broke, USA
''The Lost Bank is a superbly written, insider account of the collapse of Washington Mutual, among the more surprising downfalls of the financial crisis. It's a story of hubris, ambition, and poor judgment that entertains but also is a disturbing coda to the difficult period, providing enduring lessons about how a group of executives who predicted the housing collapse were somehow felled by it.'' --Gregory Zuckerman, nationally bestselling author of The Greatest Trade Ever
''Lucid, entertaining . . . One of the best accounts yet . . . of the Great Crash as it played out on a human scale.'' --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
''An exhaustively researched and well-written account of one of the widely ignored chapters of the great financial crisis. Grind does an excellent job of bringing the complex story to life, and capturing the sense of drama and the impact on peoples' lives. It also casts a spotlight on the role of the FDIC, which has not received as much attention as it should have done. An insightful and well-written book.'' --Gillian Tett, award-winning journalist
''An eye-opening book.'' --Booklist
''Kirsten Grind's dogged reporting lays bare a tale of out-of-control salesmen and executive-level gamblers who transformed one of America's most respected banks into a weapon of mass financial destruction. The Lost Bank is a page-turning read that exposes the Wild West banking tactics that harmed customers, workers, and the nation as a whole.'' --Michael W. Hudson, author of The Monster
''A detailed, instructive account of a bank failure far away from the power centers of New York City.'' --Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
KIRSTEN GRIND has received more than a dozen national awards for her work, including a Pulitzer Prize finalist citation for her work covering the collapse of Washington Mutual. A reporter for the Wall Street Journal, she lives in New York City.
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent Accounting of a Painful Episode
By Salty in Seattle
My spouse was on the "Senior Management Team" at WAMU right up until the end, and while she is not named in the book, she worked with all those folks and I know a few of them myself.
First and foremost, Ms. Grind clearly did her homework and delivers an insightful and detailed accounting of what went so fabulously right for a long, long time - only to have it blow up in everyone's face. I can honestly say that we had absolutely no idea of what was going on with the Retail side of the bank (my wife was on the Commercial side) and in the bigger picture, NOBODY really had any idea how bad it was going to be. Even the experts (at least the ones anyone could hear) were expecting a "correction", but not a global meltdown of our Financial Sytem as we knew it.
As it regards the book, Ms. Grind clears-up a lot of myths and urban legends surrounding the collapse of the bank. Here's three biggies, for example:
1. The FDIC reached over the OTS and closed WAMU without appropirate proceedure or authority.
2. WAMU had plenty of liquidity to survive the crisis.
3. Kerry Killinger and Steve Rotella were first informed of the shut-down when they heard it on a TV Monitor in an Airport Bar.
All three completely untrue and clearly explained in the book.
It's obvioulsy fun for me to read about these characters that I knew, and in a few cases still bump into. But the bigger take-away is to remind us all of the hubris that infects us when things are going well. "It will NEVER END" we tell ourselves. We'll all just get richer and richer until everyone in North America has a NetJets pass and we'll just compete for the best seats at the Charity events in New York, Aspen and here in Seattle. Right?
As I was really getting into the meat of the story, I said to my wife "I'm suprised you haven't read this yet - it's great". Her reply?
"I'm not sure I want to revisit all that pain".
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
An intrigueing story, masterfully presented
By Amazon Customer
The author has taken the salient facts --pulled like strands from an Olympic-sized swimming pool of spaghetti -- and woven them into an engrossing tapestry of greed, moral blindness and denial. It documents the rise of a reputable local financial institution into a nationwide mega-institution based on neglectful deceit (if not outright fraud) in the sale of mortgage loans to people who could not afford them and did not understand the transactions or their consequences. The result is a picture of overwhelming greed and denial of the laws of physics. It was a failure to acknowledge that the huge volume of heavily marketed bad loans -- that the bank executives eventually came to recognize were either fraudulent or given in knowing disregard of mis- or non-representations of borrowers' inability to pay -- would eventually create a huge problem for the institution. The problem was exacerbated by regulatory failures, including tension between two federal agencies having related but divided responsibilities for financial institutions' health, their concerns about turf and different views of regulation. This is also the story of an executive team and board that was tied up in short-term goals, internal politics and personalities to the extent that it completely lost sight of its original mission, to provide reasonable loans to people who could repay them. A sad story but one that should be widely read and understood in today's political and economic climate.
48 of 51 people found the following review helpful.
Former WaMulian's perspective
By Banker Gone Gaming
This is an extensively researched, great book that will be enjoyed particularly by those who are interested in understanding the psychology of some of the participants behind the financial collapse.
The book is more about the unraveling of Kerry Killinger and his executive team than it is about the bigger problems that plagued the credit and housing markets. But it's a great snapshot of the biggest bank collapse in American history and those who were supposed to regulate it. All told, the book feels accurate.
I was an officer at WaMu, having spent time in various marketing roles at the bank, including tours with the Retail Bank and Home Loans. I was there right up till the end and remember vividly that evening on September 25, 2008 when we found out we had been seized and handed over to JPMorgan Chase. We weren't surprised we were snatched up by another bank, but we were we disappointed it was Chase, which we knew would almost certainly eliminate all our jobs. As a marketer, the knowledge that Chase would impose its cold, tone deaf brand across our branch network, including Seattle, just added insult to injury. While I certainly wasn't privy to the conversations happening among WaMu executive team (thank God), I have to say the book largely reflects the perception that I believe most of the employees at headquarters had at the time. We thought WaMu's leaders, namely those in Home Loans, had completely lost their way and polluted the portfolio. We thought Kerry's pollyannaish view of the world totally outweighed the intellect that had made him a banking superstar. We thought our own executives' terrible decisions were due not only to their own greed and naivete, but also pressure from the secondary markets. (Meaning, effectively WaMu was seduced by the Goldmans and Lehmans of the world; the investment banks created an insatiable hunger for dangerous, high margin products that slowly infected each step of process - from the secondary markets, the consumer banks, the brokers and ultimately the consumers too. That's not to say WaMu's leaders weren't also culpable - I think they were). We thought Kerry never had access to the real power corridors roamed by the likes of Hank Paulson, Jamie Dimon and Sheila Bair. We thought that although we technically had adequate liquidity, a significant run on the bank would doom us because our massive deposit base would wipe out entirely the FDIC's reserves. We thought that neither Bair nor Paulson was particularly motivated to try to help the shareholders, customers or employees. That all proved to be true and this book does a good job, to varying degrees, of weaving some of those factors into a great story. Kirsten Grind really captured what was happening internally at WaMu, in my opinion.
At the end of the day, this was a sad time for our customers, shareholders, and employees. For the honest, hardworking people who "just worked there" and didn't know about the misguided decisions destroying the company, it was both fascinating and disheartening to watch the dominoes fall. We felt for our customers, our shareholders and each other. I think that comes through well in the book. As Grind notes, the place had an amazing culture, one I can't really articulate in a way that does it justice. People just loved working there, even as we started to unravel. The desire to do right by the customer was built into our DNA, and to see the way these terrible products had been foisted off on consumers to feed the cash machine felt like such a betrayal by leadership. Still, whether earnings were positive or negative, it was the best place I ever worked because of the people. So for me, reading this book felt like walking through a ghost story, as I sadly nodded my head throughout it. The financial crisis taught us that there were villains everywhere: the banks, the FDIC, OTS, Treasury, the brokers, the investment houses, and on and on it goes. This book certainly validates that, exposing both Kerry Killinger and Sheila Bair as myopic, out of their depth and hopelessly biased in very different ways. Sometimes I wish we could sentence Killinger and Bair to sit in a room together for the rest of their lives and contemplate their mistakes and philosophical differences while annoying muzak plays in the background. But the system doesn't punish the privileged equally, as we know. In general, I've moved on with my life and don't care much anymore.
This really is a good book. I would have liked to see Grind explore the impact of the Federal Reserve's (lack of) oversight throughout the 1990s and 2000s, along with on the secondary market's influence on the entire financial system, including consumer banks. I think those factors were the primary catalysts, at least in the beginning. In that regard, I think those omissions make the book a little bit incomplete. However, it's not a story about that. It's about WaMu. It's about the guy who built it, then lost it. And that's enough.
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