Washington Mutual is a good bank. Easy to do business with and employees almost always polite  and helpful. The problem is bad loans and even worse management. killinger, should be in jail. His board should be with him. He knew or should have known that those loans were putting the bank in trouble. He cared only about his bonus. Now, he and the board are going to get bonuses and they will not count the bad loans. It is criminal what he is trying to get away with.

     The bank and the employees are suffering. killinger should be investigated and if nothing criminal comes out of it, he should be fired at once. Put a teller, any teller in charge and they could only do a better job.

     Notice that killinger never had a cap or Mister in front of his name. He doesn't deserve it.

My mom & dad had their mortgage with WAMU, we presently have ours with them and now our son and daughter-in-law have theirs with them too.  How can a bank with such a good long term reputation throw it all away through apparent greed?  I hope they come to their senses and turn this around.  I think a good start would be to make a change and get Killenger out!

As a retail banker, we always told our worst customers to go to WAMU. Not because we wanted to hurt them, but because our standards would not allow them to get into a house or loan that we could not support. None ever came back, and my guess is they received loans that they did not deserve.

The eventual fall of WAMU is well deserved. Financing the lowest common denomiator has to come to roost. A bailout here is not for the consumer, the customer or the general investor. It is for the board of directors and management. Working in the banking industry for 20 years, I see them flailing at a horrible market they are too deeply invested in, and heading out on the only life raft they have. A large bailout that does not involve anyone but the upper management.

Sts

WM is my only financial holding. i ve been watching it for years based on old Motely Fool takeover speculation. Maybe now is the time. Is TPG trying to beat JPMorgan to the punch?  Somethings gonna give with or without KK.

Wamu Gave me a home equity line of credit, Which i thought was great,  until i looked into useing it!!!! Seems they lowered my heloc because of my fico score decreasing, So they say! ,But i called fico and they told me my score had only dropped slightly due to taking advantage of some 0% credit card offers, I guess just applying for a credit card hurts your credit, But wamu used that as an excuse to drop my heloc to 0 available money, Thats retarded! ill be leaving wamu now after 10 years.

Most of these complaints seem to stem from people who do not know how to balance their checkbook in the first place.  If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.  It's amazing how frequently people are willing to pass the buck onto something or somebody else when it's their own mistake.  

Before you start complaining, get your facts straight.  Learn how to balance your checkbook and read what you sign - BEFORE YOU SIGN IT.  

S Johanson, you must work for WAMU. I have 3 direct deposit that go into my account and they always go into my accounts thursday night/Friday morning however when you look them up online they will always show as pending transactions until later in the day.

Your comments are unnecessary and to call people uneducated is typical of people ignorance to their own faults.

Get out while the getting is easy!  WaMu stinks, whether or not S Johanson thinks so.   They have no customer service, and don't care a whit about customers.   They should fail and miserably.   I have two masters degrees, working on a third.  

how many of you are shorting this stock?

As a non disgruntled fromer WaMu manager, I can assure you things have deteriorated within this company on the customer service side. During my time, the avg wait to speak to a PERSON on the 800 number went from 1.2 minutes to 5 minutes. This was a cost saving decision by expanding the automation system, slowing the voice down, and reducing over employee count at the call centers. This saved the company a lot of money as studies have shown that if a wait is more than 4 minutes, most people hang up. In the Branches it was much worse. The employees were driven like used car sales people to sell loans. If you had equity in your home, their job was to convince you to take it out thru a home equity loan. When I say driven, all meetings for YEARS at both local and regional were on maximizing a branch loan pipeline. Tellers and personal bankers had phone call goals ( yes telemarketing)  NOt just a few but in some cases hours and hours of cold calling at night after the branches closed to find and hound people to pull their credit. If a customer qualified, regardless of whether it made since to the customer nor not, the employees at all levels were instructed, at risk of termination,  to hard sell it. Fees went up in most areas. Of course there is a financial strain on them now, their greed of getting as many loans as possible put them here.   There should be no bailout of this behavior.  The comapny has lost in my state hundreds management and senior bankers who have left the insanity of the used car lot called a branch.