In the crazy days of 2005 and 2006, when home prices were soaring and mortgage underwriting standards were crumbling, it took foresight and judgment to see that it was all a bubble.
Kerry Killinger at a financial crisis hearing in Washington.
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James Vanasek and Ronald Cathcart, former WaMu risk officers.
As it happens, there was a bank chief executive whose internal forecasts now seem prescient. “I have never seen such a high-risk housing market,” he wrote to the bank’s chief risk officer in 2005. A year later he forecast the housing market would be “weak for quite some time as we unwind the speculative bubble.”
At that same bank, executives checking for fraudulent mortgage applications found that at one bank office 42 percent of loans reviewed showed signs of fraud, “virtually all of it attributable to some sort of employee malfeasance or failure to execute company policy.” A report recommended “firm action” against the employees involved.
In addition to such internal foresight and vigilance, that bank had regulators who spotted problems with procedures and policies. “The regulators on the ground understood the issues and raised them repeatedly,” recalled a retired bank official this week.
This is not, however, a column about a bank that got things right. It is about Washington Mutual, which in 2008 became the largest bank failure in American history.
What went wrong? The chief executive, Kerry K. Killinger, talked about a bubble but was also convinced that Wall Street would reward the bank for taking on more risk. He kept on doing so, amassing what proved to be an almost unbelievably bad book of mortgage loans. Nothing was done about the office where fraud seemed rampant.
The regulators “on the ground” saw problems, as James G. Vanasek, the bank’s former chief risk officer, told me, but the ones in Washington saw their job as protecting a “client” and took no effective action. The bank promised change, but did not deliver. It installed programs to spot fraud, and then failed to use them. The board told management to fix problems but never followed up.
WaMu, as the bank was known, is back in the news because the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation sued Mr. Killinger and two other former top officials of the bank last week, seeking to “hold these three highly paid senior executives, who were chiefly responsible for WaMu’s higher-risk home-lending program, accountable for the resulting losses.”
Mr. Killinger responded by going on the attack. His lawyers called the suit “baseless and unworthy of the government.” Mr. Killinger, they said, deserved praise for his excellent management.
I’ll let the courts sort out whether Mr. Killinger will become the rare banker to be penalized for making disastrously bad loans. But I am fascinated by how his bank came to make those loans despite his foresight.
Answers are available, or at least suggested, in the mass of documents collected and released by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which held hearings on WaMu last year. Mr. Killinger wanted both the loan book and profits to rise rapidly, and saw risky loans as a means to those ends.
Moreover, this was a market in which a bank that did not reduce lending standards would lose a lot of business. A decision to publicly decry the spread of high-risk lending and walk away from it — something Mr. Vanasek proposed before he retired at the end of 2005 — might have saved the bank in the long run. In the short run, it would have devastated profits.
Ronald J. Cathcart, who became the chief risk officer in 2006, told a Senate hearing he pushed for more controls but ran into resistance. The bank’s directors, he said, were interested in hearing about problems that regulators identified over and over again. “But,” he added, “there was little consequence to these problems not being fixed.”
There were consequences for him. He was fired in 2008 after he took his concerns about weak controls and rising losses to both the board and to regulators from the Office of Thrift Supervision.
By early 2007, the subprime mortgage market was collapsing, and the bank was trying to rush out securitizations before that market vanished. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, a secondary regulator, was pushing to impose tighter regulation, but the primary regulator, the Office of Thrift Supervision, was successfully resisting allowing the F.D.I.C. to even look at the bank’s loan files.
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