Has the Wamu seizure made things much, much worse?

I have much less expertise than you, Justin. But there must be a reason why they call it unsecured debt. This isn't the first time we've seen institutions default on bonds, and almost certainly won't be the last.

This is unfortunate, but it should serve as a wake up call to all American investors. If you want to protect your money, you need to diversify and invest at least some of it overseas. These are hard times for American investing firms. I personally use offshore bank accounts and they have helped me with diversification and asset protection. If you want to read more on why offshore investing is smarter, feel free to visit my website.

Best,
Frank Miller
http://www.theoffshorebankaccount.com

Now Washington Mutual, practically the biggest US banks, has sunk. What next?

In retrospect, men have always been ultra smart at hindsight. All the ills and suspected causes of the current scary meltdown are fast surfacing:
Insatiable human greed, Wall Street relentless credit default swaps, consistent non-transparency of the CEOs, the failure of the regulatory system, continuous over-production and over-accumulation.

Verily all these factors were known before, but those in the know either pretended they did not exist or blinded completely by the shocking facts. Well, the world is now paying a dear price for this human folly. The domino effect lingers on.

I have (had?) a LOT of common shares of WaMu, purchased from 2003-2006.

I've always been an investor who researched carefully any reasonably sized investment I made, and WaMu is the only one I went into with second thoughts.

Why second thoughts? Because management does matter, and WaMu had a track record to suggest that its management was not top-drawer.

Why invest in them then? Because, though retired, my dividends and interest from the great companies--e.g., MO, BAC, WBK--were building up cash that I wanted to place somewhere, and I already had very large positions in those companies. It was an ill-fated attempt to diversify the dividend-producing part of my portfolio.

Indeed, my management concerns materialized to reality last week. Not even they knew they were in the trouble they were in.

Not that I attribute the failure to human nature, i.e., greed. I attribute it to the laziness of oversight, starting with WaMu's top management, abetted by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 that did much to remove regulatory oversight.

What damaging greed there was, I believe, can be found dominantly with the 28-year-old self styled geniuses who got $10 million bonuses for selling flawed securitizing instruments by whatever means they could. With no overarching moral compass, and no hard regulation, it became a trillion-dollar game of liars' poker.

Years ago, as president and CEO of IT firms, I put forth the then-corny motto "good ethics is good business, and vice versa" -- AND I enforced it without real-politik exceptions. That served me and my investors well.

With guys from Worldcom and Enron now in jail, and some from Wall Street likely to join them, maybe the motto AND its enforcement will be more universally accepted.

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