The Lost Bank

The Story of Washington Mutual - The Biggest Bank Failure in American History

By: Kirsten Grind

Narrated by: Traber Burns

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.

Written as compellingly as the finest fiction, The Lost Bank makes it clear that the collapse of Washington Mutual was not just the largest bank failure in American history. It is a story of talismanic qualities, reflecting the incredible rise and the precipitous collapse of not only an institution, but of trust, fortunes, and the marketplaces for risk across the world.

About the author: Kirsten Grind has received more than a dozen national awards for her work, including a Pulitzer Prize finalist citation for her work covering the collapse of Washington Mutual. A reporter for the Wall Street Journal, she lives in New York City.

©2012 Kirsten Grind (P)2012 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

“The transformation of Washington Mutual from folksy community lender to reckless 2000-branch behemoth is one of the epic stories of American finance…Grind tells this boom-bust story without lapsing into melodrama or malice, and her tale is all the more powerful for that.” (Sebastian Mallaby, New York Times best-selling author)

“Kirsten Grind has written a first-rate accounting of the spectacular collapse of Washington Mutual and how behemoth JPMorgan Chase picked over its carcass. Thanks to Grind’s winning narrative, what was previously one of the less-well known financial disasters of September 2008 is now fully - and entertainingly - explicated.” (William D. Cohan, New York Times best-selling author)

“Lucid, entertaining…One of the best accounts yet…of the Great Crash as it played out on a human scale.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Great Book

The narrator has a good tone. The story is easy to follow and describes the humble beginnings of the bank to the down fall.

Good inside look at a bank's slow death

I have been listening to a lot of books centered on the wages of corporate greed, and this one is pretty well written and performed. I can't wrap my head around how the leaders of so many businesses completely lose any sense of morality (Sacklers, Holmes, now Killinger), and how our government is either too stupid or corrupt to reign it all in. (Corrupt AND stupid, I say
..) A person in the story says, late in the proceedings, "There's no law against stupidity." But when you're managing someone's life savings, shouldn't there be?

Former WAMU employee

It was interesting to read the story behind the story. I knew each of these people personally and could really relate to the people and events in the book. It did bring out several things that I was not aware of which explained some of the chaos that was going on at the time.

Front row seats

This book was so good. Almost like a thriller but for the financial industry nerds. I worked for WaMu during this craziness and it’s funny how quickly you forget some of these things. Highly recommend if you were apart of the financial industry during the mid to late 2000s

Interesting story

This book was great although it was hard to pay attention sometimes. I studied Financial economics for my undergraduate and this book was recommended by my professor. This book was great and I learned a lot.

I would only recommend this book to those that are truly interested in bank failures and the financial crisis.

The big short is my favorite book so far on the financial crisis.