An award-winning reporter chronicles the calamitous story of Washington Mutual, the single-largest bank failure in American history, in a fast-paced, compelling, and gripping saga of greed and excess.

During the most dizzying days of the financial crisis, Washington Mutual, a bank with hundreds of billions of dollars in its coffers, suffered a crippling bank run. The story of its final, brutal collapse in the autumn of 2008, and its controversial sale to JPMorgan Chase, is an astonishing account of how one bank lost itself to greed and mismanagement, and how the entire financial industry—even the entire country—lost its way as well.

Written as compellingly as the finest fiction, The Lost Bank introduces readers to the regulators and the bankers, the home buyers and the lenders who together created the largest bank failure in American history. The result is a magisterial and gripping account of the incredible rise and the precipitous collapse of not only an institution but of trust, fortunes, and the marketplaces for risk across the world.

In 2009, Kirsten Grind wrote a series of investigative articles about Washington Mutual for the Puget Sound Business Journal in Seattle. WaMu had collapsed in September 2008 during the financial crisis, marking the largest bank failure in U.S. history. The stories later received a Pulitzer finalist citation and won numerous other national awards. Grind then spent the next two years interviewing hundreds of people and digging through thousands of documents for The Lost Bank, the first book to be written about WaMu's failure. It is written as a narrative, so that even those with little interest in banks or finance can understand (and relate to) one of America's greatest financial catastrophes. Grind is now a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in New York.