About this item
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.
About the Author
In 2009, Kirsten Grind wrote a series of investigative articles about Washington Mutual for the Puget Sound Business Journal in Seattle. WaMu had collapsed in September 2008 during the financial crisis, marking the largest bank failure in U.S. history. The stories later received a Pulitzer finalist citation and won numerous other national awards. Grind then spent the next two years interviewing hundreds of people and digging through thousands of documents for The Lost Bank, the first book to be written about WaMu's failure. It is written as a narrative, so that even those with little interest in banks or finance can understand (and relate to) one of America's greatest financial catastrophes. Grind is now a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in New York.
