Company: J-P-Morgan
Date: 2008-12-29
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current

Bank gone wild.
Pros: It used to be a great company but that company no longer exists.
Cons: Company is bankrupted. Layoff of all Seattle HQ employees are imminent. "We hope to do to this industry what Wal-Mart did to theirs, Starbucks did to theirs, Costco did to theirs and Lowe's-Home Depot did to their industry. And I think if we've done our job, five years from now you're not going to call us a bank."
Kerry Killinger
WaMu chief executive, 2003
During Killinger's tenure, WaMu pressed sales agents to pump out loans while disregarding borrowers' incomes and assets, according to former employees. The bank set up what insiders described as a system that enabled real-estate agents to collect fees of more than $10,000 for bringing in borrowers, sometimes making the agents more beholden to WaMu than they were to their clients.