I had to manually type this up off of Amazon. I think I transcribed it correctly. I have some serious questions about where he's getting the 55 cents on the dollar. enjoy.
Sunday September 21 2008
(…about selling MS to JPM (Pages 274,275))
The fact is, had John called Jamie again, I’m sure the JPMorgan chief would still have said no. WaMu was Jamie’s top priority, as I had known for some time.
Pages 292, 293
September 25, 2008
...
Then Washington Mutual went down – the biggest failure in US banking history. While legislators were negotiating, Sheila Bair called me around 11:00 am to break the news that the FDIC was going to seize the bank, and that JPMorgan would pay the government $1.9 billion for the company, which had $301 billion in assets.
WaMu’s demise wasn’t a surprise. It had been struggling for months and had taken a catastrophic turn for the worse: Its CDS rates, already shocking at 2,742 on September 15, had nearly doubled to 5,266 on Wednesday, September 24, as the bank was hit by a run on deposits. Customers had withdrawn $16.7 billion over the preceding ten days.
Back in March, JPMorgan had wanted to buy WaMu, but its regulator, the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), and management had opted instead for a $7 billion capital investment from a group led by the private-equity firm TPG. This decision proved to be a mistake: an acquisition by JPMorgan would have stabilized the bank. Still, I had kept in close touch with Sheila and Ben Bernanke on WaMu and periodically talked with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon.
Unfortunately, the WaMu solution wasn’t perfect, although it was handled smoothly using the normal FDIC process. JPMorgan’s purchase cost taxpayers nothing and no depositors lost money, but the deal gave senior WaMu debt holders about 55 cents on the dollar, roughly equal to what securities had been trading for. In retrospect, I see that, in the middle of a panic, this was a mistake. WaMu, the sixth-biggest bank in the country, was systematically important. Crushing the owners of preferred and subordinated debt and clipping senior debt holders only unsettled the debt holders in other institutions, adding to the market’s uncertainty about government action. Banks were even less willing to lend to one another. In the future, I concluded, we were going to need to go beyond the standard FDIC resolution process for a failing bank