The Lost Bank

In late 2009, Kirsten Grind wrote a groundbreaking series of investigative stories for the Puget Sound Business Journal about Washington Mutual's collapse. Even though WaMu-an institution with holdings of hundreds of billions of dollars-was the largest bank failure in US history, it had gone largely unexamined by other journalists because of the many other companies that failed during the financial crisis. Grind's series garnered an enormous amount of nationwide attention and critical accolades, including being named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Gerald Loeb Award.

Grind focuses on the actions of the bank's executives and employees, from WaMu's visionary first chief executive to his successor whose hunger for growth led him to take the bank down a dangerous path to an attorney who championed subprime lending until it all came crashing down around her. Grind's compelling account of the people and events surrounding the failure underscores the shady financial engineering and the hubris and greed that made this unbelievable story possible.

Reading more like a tick-tock thriller in which the characters' behavior plays out more like a Shakespearean tragedy, The Lost Bank has been called "Lucid, entertaining" (Publishers Weekly, starred review), "A first-rate job by a first-rate journalist" (Gary Rivlin, author of Broke, USA), and "eye-opening" (Booklist). It is a story of epic proportion, tracing not only the meteoric rise and precipitous collapse of an American institution but of trust, fortunes, and marketplaces around the world.