Victim of its own success...

It's interesting how a business can become a victim of its own success.

In a sense, that seems to be what happened to IndyMac.

Much of the lender's success was driven by so-called Alt-A loans, adjustable interest rate loans that were risky by market standards because many were issued to borrowers with questionable credit.

But when those borrowers began defaulting, and the market for investors who bought those loans dried up... IndyMac went down the tubes.

Of course, there's nothing new there. Everybody by now knows IndyMac's demise.

But Evan Wagner, spokesman for what after the FDIC stepped in is IndyMac Federal Bank, told me that IndyMac might not have been able to survive in a kind of "new world" of banking.

It had become so driven by the unique loans it was giving that it might not have been able to operate in a world of fewer banks.

"IndyMac had to become a conventional lender very quickly...and the margins were so much thinner," he said.