So again, blaming the old boy, 'clubby' attitudes may not have necessarily been completely wrong, but the real problem was bad business practices. The ex-CEO and many others cashed in and never looked back. Getting away with that sounds pretty clubby to me. LA Times:
James G. Vanasek, who was WaMu's chief risk officer from 1999 to 2005, told a Senate committee that "at times borrowers were coached to fill out applications with overstated incomes or net worth adjusted to meet the minimum underwriting policy requirements."
Asked if he ever warned top executives of his concerns, Vanasek replied, "Constantly."
"I stood in front of thousands of senior Washington Mutual managers and executives at an annual management retreat in 2004 and countered the senior-executive speaker ahead of me on the program who was rallying the troops with the company's advertising tag line, 'The Power of Yes,' " he said.
"The implication of this statement was that Washington Mutual would find some way to make a loan. The tag line symbolized the management attitude about mortgage lending more clearly than anything that I can tell you," Vanasek said.
