IndyMac rock
Great financial minds think alike, what?
No, I don't mean I'd broken the piggy bank and gone in on the Panhandle wind farms the same day Boone Pickens did this week.
I mean when today at 3 p.m. I mentioned to our advertising manager, Michael Moreno, that federal agents in the form of the FDIC were across the street shutting down IndyMac Bank, he slapped his hand on his desk.
"Dang -- good thing I didn't follow my instincts and buy stock when they slipped to 44 cents the other day."
I'd seen that same price and thought the same thing. Half a buck a share for the bank that just 18 months ago Chairman and CEO Michael Perry of San Marino described as "one of the 10 largest thrifts in the country, with almost $30 billion in assets" -- excellent deal, no?
That was the day Perry was donating $10,000 with a big mock check at a grip-and-grin for the San Marino Library Foundation -- on top of the $100,000 it had already given the library's construction capital campaign.
Those days are over. Friday his outfit, which rode the sub-prime boom until it became the crisis, became the biggest retail bank to fail in the mortgage debacle. In fact, analysts are saying it's the biggest failure since the S&L crisis of the late 1980s.
It's such a complicated failure that the government can't actually let it go under entirely -- tomorrow the North Lake Avenue tower will become headquarters for the new IndyMac Federal Bank for a time.
But it's a massive failure nonetheless. The blame goes, in order, to: 1) The bank. Making hay by making loans to people who couldn't possibly repay them was unconscionable, not to mention bad business in the long run. 2) Wall Street. Our nation's financial geniuses encouraged the fraudulent lending by telling thrifts they'd create a complicated new kind of commercial paper in bundled mortgages -- the more mortgages, the better. In so doing, they've tanked the markets for the rest of us. Some made out like bandits and are laughing on East Hampton lawns as they read the news from Pasadena. For the rest of us schmucks, that's real money we're losing in our 401(k)s, ya creeps. 3) Home buyers who took out the loans and went along with the prodding from mortgage peddlers to lie about their incomes and assets in order to move into the mini-manse in the sprawl.
Caveat emptor applies to us all. But the little guys still get the stiffest shaft. Because you can bet the ranch the big guys salted away enough scratch to see themselves through until the next scam comes along . . .