Friday, September 26, 2008

Some context.

The biggest bank failure in American history went down yesterday. I just read about it in The Wall Street Journal and was struck by this sentence: "WaMu...still boasts...a network of 2,239 branches..."

Now the context part.

Thirteen years ago I was the co-creative lead on the account of the largest retail bank in New York. Those were quaint,old-fashioned times when we had a functioning government and regulation like Glass-Steagall (repealed under the Republican mis-lead Congress of 1999.) At that time, the largest retail bank in New York had fewer than 450 branches.

What happened that WaMu could have nearly 600% more branches than that?

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