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In December, 1986, the bank in my hometown in Colorado was closed by the FDIC for some irregular lending practices. My mother banked there, but as a single mom with three kids, her account didn’t have a lot in it when the FDIC said it could take 30 days to release assets in the bank.

However, her employer, a construction firm, was a partnership and one of the partners was a huge shareholder in the bank. The company had its accounts at the bank. And so, one week before Christmas, my mother found herself out of a job because of a banking scandal.

I therefore have some fairly strong feelings about banking bailouts. In 1986, nobody offered to bailout Buena Vista Bank & Trust. The biggest employer in town, outside of the state government (prison) and the school district just about went belly-up. They fired or laid off dozens of employees. The ones that were fired were told they did so to make the employees eligible for unemployment. One was an accountant with 18 years experience; another was my mother.

The company limped along and was eventually reformed under the single ownership of the guy not involved in the bank scandal. Mom moved to Michigan and limped along until she found a job where she has been for about 20 years now.

So when I heard that the FDIC had seized WaMu, I initially felt bad for people who banked there. Then, the news told me that banking is continuing, business as usual, with a new owner JP Morgan Chase overseeing it. Okay, I’m glad that 22 years later the FDIC is more efficient, but I don’t want business to continue as usual.

No, we don’t need a fullscale panic, but some reaction would be a good thing…some reaction from the average citizen or the average customer. We heard from employees that they worry about their job security under JP Morgan and some business reporters said it means WaMu stockholders are wiped out, but what does that really mean to me? I don’t bank there. Don’t have stock in the company. But there is some relevance to Reagan’s trickle down economics theory and what screws the big boys eventually screws the taxpayer.

So what does the WaMu failure mean to me? Or to you?

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