Senate Report to Show How WaMu Became a Financial ‘Polluter’
For the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, it is WaMu week. Tomorrow, the subcommittee will release more than 500 documents on Washington
Jul 31, 202025.8K Shares992.8K Views
Tomorrow, the subcommittee will release more than 500 documents on Washington Mutual, the $300 billion bank that helped fuel the subprime bubble and then collapsed in the biggest bank failure in U.S. history. It will also hold a hearing with WaMu executives, including Kerry Killinger, the former chairman and chief executive officer. Then, on Friday, the subcommittee — headed by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) — will release an investigative report, the fruit of 18 months of labor, into how the Main Street bank took on and eventually died due to Wall Street practices.
Details about the report started to emerge today. The company decided in 2003 to move aggressively into subprime lending to bolster earnings, ultimatelyproducing $77 billion in mortgage-backed securities. The company changed pay practices to prize quantity over quality. And it “built a conveyor belt to dump toxic mortgage assets into the financial system like a polluter dumping toxic substances into the river,” Levin toldreporters. Expect ugly revelations all week.
Paula M. Graham
Reviewer
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