Summary

Taibbi met with Linda Almonte in her father’s rundown house in Satellite Beach, Florida. She had been an executive with GE some years back and was a shopaholic and always drove nice cars. As a single mother of three, she was living temporarily with her father and living off her social security checks. At one time she was on public assistance. Linda had a long story to tell. She worked at Chase via Washington Mutual as a kind of roving trouble-shooter. When banks got into messes, she would help them work out of it. Her job took her cross country. WaMu collapsed in 2008. At that time, it was the sixth largest bank in America and the biggest to ever fail. WaMu fundamentally failed because of its penchant for fraudulent subprime mortgages. One executive had the goal of making WaMu the...