JPMorgan Chase Takes Over WaMu

Updated from 8:23 a.m. EDT

You can find more stories like this in our On the Brink series.

JPMorgan Chase (JPM) struck a deal Thursday night to buy all the deposits, assets and certain liabilities of Washington Mutual's (WM) banking operations after the Seattle-based company was seized by regulators.

The takeover, arranged by the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, excludes the senior unsecured debt, subordinated debt and preferred stock of Washington Mutual's banks. JPMorgan Chase won't acquire any assets or liabilities of the banks' parent holding company or the holding company's nonbank subsidiaries.

As part of the transaction, JPMorgan Chase will pay the FDIC about $1.9 billion. Washington Mutual was once the largest U.S. thrift, and its failure is the biggest ever for a domestic bank.

This is the second time this year JPMorgan has come to the rescue of an ailing financial giant. In March, it bought Bear Stearns after the investment bank nearly collapsed.

The acquisition of Washington Mutual's banking operations should add to earnings immediately and boost profits by more than 50 cents a share in 2009. JPMorgan Chase expects to incur pretax merger costs of about $1.5 billion while achieving annual pretax cost savings of roughly $1.5 billion by 2010.

Before being salvaged, Washington Mutual had been teetering for months, and its downfall makes it the latest financial institution to be undone by the housing slump and credit crisis.

Since the beginning of September alone, the government has rescued Fannie Mae (FNM), Freddie Mac (FRE) and AIG (AIG), Lehman Brothers has filed for bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch (MER) was purchased by Bank of America (BAC), and Goldman Sachs (GS) and Morgan Stanley (MS) decided to become bank holding companies.

Alongside those developments, 12 U.S. banks failed this year before the government intervened at Washington Mutual. Because of the turmoil, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and others proposed a $700 bailout of the financial sector, on which Congress was expected to vote this weekend, but now its approval appears to be in doubt.

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