The mortgage crisis finally arrives in Seattle
Last week, we find out that King County housing prices are back to where they were a year ago.
Today, WaMu pulls out the long knives and cuts over 3000 jobs.
For most of the year, all we heard from the “housing experts” was that Seattle’s housing market wasn’t going to get hurt, and that we’d probably ride out whatever bubble-popping came along. I wonder if those same “experts” are cashing out their WaMu accounts right now and stocking up on lentils and beans.
And while I’m thinking about it, could we schedule the bank run on WaMu for later in the week? I’m busy tomorrow and Wednesday and really don’t have time to stand in line to close my account.
They still have several thousand employees. Most of these people were dead weight and accessories to their subprime mortgage ripoff campaign anyway. The people they’re cutting were mostly part of the problem and karma’s simply coming to collect. The regular banking portion of WaMu is still fine and WaMu customers for the most part have nothing to fear. If anything, they have a lot of business to bring back, so they’re probably going to be really nice to their remaining customer base.
Don’t ask how I know. But I know ;P
WaMu was not only bigger into subprime mortgages than they would like to admit now; they’ve also pushed option ARMs for years.
I recently pulled my funds from WaMu due to how they’ve been pointing their finger at Mortgage Brokers when they (and other banks like them) created these programs, pushed them at the retail level and had their Wholesale Account Executives push them to the Mortgage Broker community.