EXCERPT With the US financial system teetering on the brink, it emerged that the chief executive of failed bank Washington Mutual may end up with a "golden parachute" of more than $13 million - for 18 days he held the job.
Alan Fishman was handed a $7.5 million signing bonus when he joined the barely solvent bank on Sept. 7, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Shockingly, his employment agreement also provided for a $6.15 million lump-sum severance payment if he were canned without cause, the filing shows.
Fishman ended up being in charge of the biggest bank failure in US history. The former chief executive of Brooklyn-based Independence Community Bank had been hired to help the bank rebound from soaring mortgage losses.
That plan went down the tubes when depositors started to quickly withdraw their money and federal regulators rushed in to shutter the bank and sell off parts of its banking operations to JPMorgan Chase for a song.
The eye-popping development came as congressional lawmakers, trying to put bitter partisanship aside, resumed negotiating a proposed $700 billion rescue of the nation's destabilized banking network. The package calls for limits on so-called "golden parachutes" for departing executives.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said he was unaware of Fishman's status. "I would assume at this point that Alan is an employee of the holding company [which WaMu still owns]," he said. "We're not buying it, we're not responsible for it, and I really don't know what's going to happen to him."
I was reading a thread on ZeroHedge yesterday that claimed JPMorgan got WaMu for...NOTHING, for FREE, essentially.
The bankers ARE the bandits, and the gov just sits around wanting there take.
We don’t HAVE a country anymore. It’s been sold. To China? To the Arabs? To the UN? who knows?