Financial collapse and housing: WaMu execs testify before Senate
Update: CSPAN3 livestreaming the hearing here
The Senate seems to have quite a bit of evidence suggesting the WaMu team deliberately securitized bad bad bad loans as ‘great!’ loans..
WSJ live blogging it here
“The worst managed business I had seen in my career.” That is how Washington Mutual’s former president described his company’s home loan division.
The mortgage lending practices at the Seattle thrift take center stage at a Senate hearing this morning.
The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations says WaMu did little to stop the loan fraud and generally risky and highly defective securitization practices in its mortgage businessWaMu’s defense? Former CEO Kerry Killinger says he reigned in his company’s mortgage business and blames his thrift’s collapse on unfair and biased regulators who were willing to save Wall Street firms, but not his own
- 7:11 am
- by Michael Corkery
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Levin: Killinger made $11 million to $20 million a year, from 2003 to 2007. He was paid $25 million when he stepped down in 2008, as his thrift was going down the tubes. Killinger may have complained about not being part of the Wall Street club (see earlier Deal Journal post). But he sure was paid like one of club.
TARP Oversight Hearing: Geithner Q&A parts 1 and 3 – CNBC.com
Memo to Team Obama: The Smartest Guys in the Room Model Does Not Work…
From Charles Krauthammer:
The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.
And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.
We need to get in a team of regular Americans on these ’round table, summit,cocktail party, bs sessions on the Hill. Whenever the Geniuses get together it is a frakkin clusterfxxk
Ideally we should send follow the Nextel commercial model for governance, firefighters, roadies and UPS folks do our representing :0) We were supposed to get that with the House, but clearly it ain’t happenin, look at Pelosi vineyards and the Top 10 wealthiest Critters, their seats are good as the gold they can spend to keep them…
try to make it to a Tea Party or call your Critters when they roll out these goofy proposals that clearly are unworkable to markets and Main St, but the critters think are swell…
ginaswo
