booktv, "wall street journal"
reporter kirsten grind talks
about her book, "the last bank,"
detailing the collapse of
washington mutual in 2008, the
largest bank failure in u.s.
history.
>> so the crisis, they say it
happened slowly and then
quickly, right?
and that was absolutely the case
at wamu.
it began to get very bad.
all of their issues, um,
internally, their internal
controls had just fallen apart.
at one point they were making
mortgages on 12 different
systems.
they had grown so fast that
there was just no be -- no
control internally.
their mortgage division had
ballooned out of control, they
had this massive trading desk.
they had turned into not a
mortgage lender as they were
only 15 years earlier when lou
was there, but almost a mortgage
middleman in which they were
sucking up mortgages and
spitting them out and making a
lot of money in between.
so all of this -- they had
turned into this just as housing
prices, which had been going up
astronomically every year, began