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Banking, finance, and taxes

Washington Mutual Gets A Brain (WM)

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

Washington Mutual built its reputation on rapid expansion of branchs and an ultra-aggressive mortgage operation–which its continued to expand into the teeth of the housing recession. The bank’s share price has only risen 14% over the last three years.

Washington Mutual is not closing branchs and cutting back its expansion, but investors have to wonder why it took so long.

The company’s CEO recently said that the mortgage buiness would be poor in 2007. One would think he could have made that statement several months ago.

Washington Mutual is now talking about share repurchases as being one of the cornerstone’s of its plans next year. Always a good answer to a poor strategic performance.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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