InsideWaMu

I’ll blog a more detailed writeup over the weekend after going through the WaMu earnings release, but here are my quick thoughts:

$5.9B loan loss provision this quarter?  Wow.  Even scarier, the residential provisioning model more or less assumed 20% frequency and 50% loss severity on outstanding residential pool.  This means - unless I’m missing something - 1 in 5 mortgages still in the [...]

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One of the joys of being a WaMu shareholder, employee or interested party is listening to the hourlong earnings call each quarter.  If you are any of the above you really should call in Tuesday July 22nd at 2:00PM Pacific.  Webcasts are available at http://www.wamu.com/ir.
These usually proceed with precision of a Swiss timepiece.

Introduction by Alan Magleby [...]

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Rotella’s internal blog has been abuzz this week with stories from the field of nervous depositors.  Yahoo and the other online boards are counting down the days until WaMu is taken over by the FDIC / OTS.  We’ll find out for sure on the July 22nd earnings call just how many deposits have run off [...]

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One is former Democratic presidential candidate.  The other is a preeminent capitalist.  But is it possible that Howard Dean and our CFO Tom Casey were separated at birth?  Take a look and try to tell yourself they’re not related. 
Which other WaMulians have a celebrity doppelganger?  When they make WaMu: The Movie who will play [...]

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One of the most amazing things about the recent credit crunch is how it blindsided nearly everyone in the industry except John Paulson  (who turned a nifty $3.7B profit shorting subprime bonds in ‘07).  CEO’s heads have rolled, bigger banks are starting to fail, and Wachovia just admitted Friday that buying Golden West for $25B was [...]

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