
In 2008, he was CEO of the biggest bank to ever fail. He's worried about another crisis
CNN
Kerry Killinger, who was named CEO of Washington Mutual in 1990 and was fired in September 2008 just weeks before the bank failed as mortgage loans continued to go bad, spoke to CNN Business about the similarities and differences between now and 2008.
Kerry Killinger was named CEO of WaMu in 1990 and was fired in September 2008 -- just weeks before the bank failed as a growing number of mortgage loans went bad. WaMu was one of several top financial firms to collapse during the financial crisis last decade, but the giant savings and loan with more than $300 billion in assets still ranks as the biggest-ever bank failure. WaMu was seized by regulators in September 2008 and sold to JPMorgan Chase (JPM) for a fire-sale price of $1.9 billion.
More than two decades ago, on January 24, 2004, I landed in Baghdad as a legal adviser, assigned an office in what was then known as the Green Zone. It was raining and cold, and my duffle bag was thrown into a puddle off the C-130 aircraft that had just done a corkscrew dive to reach the runway without risk of ground fire. Young American soldiers greeted me as we piled into a vehicle, sped out of the airport complex and then along a road called the “Highway of Death” due to car bombs and snipers.












