No. 2: Washington Mutual
Company value at time of bankruptcy: $330 billion
You might forget that, amid all the mayhem in 2008, Washington Mutual was one of the big dominoes to fall. It was, of course, precipitated by the Lehman Brothers failure and the surge of uncertainty on Wall Street that would characterize the mood for investors for the next year or so. But it wasn’t just investor uncertainty — as rumors of bankruptcy swirled around the nearly $330 billion company, customers enacted a textbook run on the bank and withdrew a staggering $16.7 billion in just 10 days. JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM) sucked up WaMu at a fire-sale price as a result — a case study in a “too big to fail” bank getting even bigger by digesting a rival.
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