WAMU: Never Mind the Losses Give’m Their Bonus


We sure wouldn’t want 3000 Washington Mutual execs to feel short-changed for screwing up:

WaMu has revised its bonus plan for nearly 3,000 top executives so continuing damage from the subprime lending collapse won’t crimp their annual awards.
The struggling Seattle-based lender said in a regulatory filing Monday it will exclude the cost of soured real-estate loans and foreclosure expenses when it calculates net operating profit, the biggest component of executives’ 2008 bonuses.

Not only will they be excluding those real expenses but they want to make up for the losses on the back of their retail banking customers by including this new criteria in the bonus calculation:

Fees from retail banking — a new factor, weighted at 25 percent. Many banks including WaMu have been increasing fees for services such as ATM withdrawals by non-customers to compensate for losses in other areas.

These fees also include over-draft charges that hammer those account holders with the fewest resources.