国际英语新闻：Business as usual after largest-ever bank collapse in U.S.

LOS ANGLEES, Sept. 26 (Xinhua) -- Depositors rushed to branches of Washington Mutual Bank here Friday to check on their accounts, only to find business as usual after the largest U.S. savings and loan bank were taken over by federal regulators and sold to its rival.

    Hundreds of branches of Washington Mutual across California, where the bank has the biggest presence in the country, were still open and customers have full access to their accounts, witnesses said.

    In the largest-ever bank failure in U.S. history, the government late Thursday seized the Seattle-based Washington Mutual's assets and sold them to JP Morgan Chase for 1.9 billion dollars in an auction, as political leaders were negotiating a 700-billion-dollar bailout plan for the country's battered financial industry.

A sign at a Washington Mutual Bank (WaMu) branch is shown in San Francisco, California September 26, 2008

    The collapse of Washington Mutual, or WaMu, indicates that the current U.S. financial crisis is going beyond Wall Street, where major investment banks have gone bankruptcy or been acquired one by one due to their exposures to bad mortgage loans.

    Washington Mutual, which had more than 180 billion dollars in deposits as of the end of June, became unsound after customers withdrew 16.7 billion dollars since last week, as its stock price kept plummeting. The stock closed at 15 cents Friday, down from about 35 dollars a share one year ago.

    The 119-year-old bank has been struggling to turn itself around for the past year, after falling housing prices and the collapsed mortgage market had left it holding billions of dollars worth of bad loans.

Customers leave a bank branch at the Washington Mutual headquarters in downtown Seattle, Washington September 26, 2008, a day after federal regulators seized the company and sold its branches, deposits and loans to JPMorgan Chase in the largest bank failure in U.S. history

Rob Dillon, a retired teacher, withdrew several thousands of dollars Friday afternoon from his checking account at a WaMu branch in Pasadena, northeast of downtown Los Angeles, and decided to leave the remaining amount in the account.

    "In such a crisis time that even a trusted financial institution like WaMu could go bankruptcy, no banks are safe. America is in recession," Dillon told Xinhua.

    "This is the big one that everybody was worried about," said Sheila Bair, chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which provides a 100,000-dollar limit insurance for each deposit account and made Thursday's seizure of Washington Mutual operations.

    New York-based JP Morgan Chase will take over WaMu's 2207 branches in 15 states across the country and the bank said the transfer will be smooth and have little impact on customers.

    Chase Bank, JP Morgan Chase's retailing banking arm, currently has no branches in the Los Angeles area, and sees the acquisition of Washington Mutual as a gateway to the local market.

    "One of the big attractions of this purchase was WaMu's California bank branches," said JP Morgan Chase spokesman Tom Kelly.

    The purchase will also make JP Morgan the No. 1 U.S. bank by deposits, with more than 900 billion dollars, followed by Bank of America with 785 billion dollars.