During the most dizzying days of the financial crisis, the biggest bank failure in American history took place.
Washington Mutual, a bank with hundreds of billions of dollars in its coffers, ran out of money.

The story of its final, brutal collapse in the fall of 2008—from the spate of acquisitions to the subprime mortgage exposure that fueled the bank’s growth, to the stock market gyrations and bank run that eventually brought the bank to its embarrassing and controversial end in its firesale to JPMorganChase—is an astonishing account of not only how one bank lost itself to greed and mismanagement, but how the entire financial industry and even the entire country lost its way as well.

Kirsten Grind’s The Lost Bank is a magesterial 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 homebuyers and the lenders, the number crunchers and the shareholders—are heroes and villains, perpetrators and victims, often changing roles with one another as the drama unfolds.

[THE LOST BANK]

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