Comments on The Sign of All Times

To be fair, it's not the employees who are expressing surprise in that quote. It's the mortgage brokers who are losing a huge chunk of business. I don't think any WaMu employees being laid off are truly "surprised". But it still sucks to lose a job.

Also, I think you have some link fixage to perform.

their retail banking is still pretty good though.

When is Kerry Killinger getting his pink slip? And, when is he selling the corporate jet and flying coach?

when shareholders tell him to.

The fun thing about this mortgage crisis is, nobody really knows where it came from. I mean, sure, subprime lending, unqualified buyers, yadda yadda. But the real issue is the exposure of ALMOST EVERYTHING through the mysteries of derivative trading that even derivative traders don't understand. And everybody's got a piece of it, even lots of companies that don't do mortgages.

WaMu's completely fucked, of course. They may not even survive as a company, especially if they find any more hunks of business that have been securitized, if that's the right word.

@5 - we can't tell him to. There's literally no way for investors to do that - we don't get to vote on his pay package, and they even ignore our votes on travel expenses as well.

(caveat - only own BofA and PBBT shares at the moment)

derivatives (including CDOs and such) are just gambling wrapped up in a pretty bow and called "assets" - thanks to the MBAs like GWB.

The sickest part of the whole mess is that the WAMU board of directors changed the compensation plan so that the senior executives won't be compensated based on the mortgage business meltdown, but rather on other parts of the business and fuzzy metrics. In other words, they screw up, people lose their jobs, and they'll still get their million dollar bonuses.

@8 - exactly - and it's not even put up to a binding vote by shareholders.

I agree with @6 that the problem is probably not the loans that WAMU originated but the securitized loans that it bought. I'm not sure decent mortgage brokers shouldn't have been surprised. As people have pointed out above it's management that seems to be escaping with their money and jobs, and monkey pres is bailing them out with the pretend stick of more regulation (hasn't really been his administration's strong suit).

So basically if I hadn't been laid off by WaMu in December I would have been laid off this month.

I wish I still had access to the internal wamu blog. That's gotta be some fun stuff right now, if they haven't shut it down.

New home loans are in the crapper. Did they not see prices and number of sales going down and inventory going up industry-wide? Expecting Wamu to keep employing them when there is little new business is like expecting Exxon to keep employing full serve gas attendants after all the oil is gone.