Feds Seize My Bank
Apparently tonight the government seized Washington Mutual and then sold it off to JPMorgan Chase.
Shareholders and some bondholders will be wiped out. WaMu deposits are guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation up to the $100,000 per account limit. Customers of Seattle-based WaMu are unlikely to be affected.
Apparently, it is the largest bank failure in United States history. I swear this has absolutely nothing to do with me quitting my job over a workplace health dispute. According to Bloomberg quting the Office of Thrift Supervision, WaMu “had ‘insufficient liquidity’ and was in an ‘unsound’ condition”.
Technically, according to the WSJ, because it was seized and then immediately emergency sold to JPMorgan, it perhaps can’t be considered an outright bank “failure”, since apparently the “transaction isn’t expected to impact the agency’s national deposit-insurance fund”.
Then again, maybe that’s just WSJ’s bias showing and not wanting to use the word “failure”, as most other reports seem, in fact, to be doing.