Wachovia's 72 Hours: Pick-a-Pay Loans, a $5B Run and Wells Fargo's Win

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Wachovia came from two North Carolina banks. The original Wachovia started in Winston-Salem in 1879 alongside R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, and First Union began in 1908 as Union National Bank, a desk in a Charlotte hotel lobby run by H.M. Victor. In 2001 First Union agreed to buy Wachovia, beat a hostile bid from Atlanta's SunTrust, then took the Wachovia name and ticker. A deliberately slow two-year systems integration helped it rank first in customer satisfaction in the University of Michigan index. In May 2006 it bought Golden West Financial, owner of World Savings Bank, for $25.5 billion, inheriting its pick-a-pay option adjustable rate mortgages, which allowed negative amortization.

Over 70% of those loans sat in California, Florida and Arizona. After an $8.9 billion second-quarter loss in 2008, CEO Ken Thompson was fired and Robert K. Steele brought in. When Washington Mutual was seized on September 26, 2008, depositors pulled $5 billion from Wachovia in one day. The FDIC's Sheila Bair and the New York Fed's Tim Geithner clashed, and Wachovia was declared systemically important. Citigroup agreed to buy its banking operations for about $1 a share with FDIC loss protection, but on October 3 Wells Fargo agreed to buy the whole bank without assistance.

• Former officials admitted the Golden West deal was negotiated in days with no time to vet the loans.
• Under the Citigroup deal, the FDIC would have absorbed loan losses beyond $42 billion.
• Citigroup sued for $60 billion and settled for $100 million.
• Wachovia paid up to $144 million in 2008 over processing more than $140 million in unsigned telemarketer checks despite warnings.
• In 2010 it was fined $160 million under the Bank Secrecy Act after cartels laundered at least $110 million through Mexican casas de cambio.