http://www.ajc.com/business/feds-sue-insiders-of-1131699.html

I suppose because I landed on my feet it's been easy to ascribe the bank failure to poor business choices and a bad market rather than gross negligence- but looking at the people who were effect by the failure (hundreds of downstream banks- who knows how their customers were affected), it makes me realize just how bad that whole thing was.

As an employee, I can tell you that they were throwing money around and aggressively pursuing growth, apparently without regard for the consequences. Tom and Earl addressed us often in the last year selling us lines about how the Fed was out to get us and how we were doing great, it's just that the Fed didn't understand our business as the largest correspondent bank in the country. I bought the deception hook, line, and sinker- and to be honest, they probably believed it all themselves. But the truth is, they made bad loans and continued spending money irresponsibly when the nets were closing in.

The old building was fine- though we WERE running out of room, but I'm certain they could have figured something out. I have to say, though, if that's what "posh" is I was unimpressed. It's not like fake-frosted glass on the doors to my floor helps me do my job any better.

Sad to see that the place I worked contributed to the pain of so many. Hopefully my new employer will have a much more positive impact on the world.

That really sucks. I can understand why you'd feel regret, but obviously the blame is with the monsters who perpetrated the fraud at the higher levels, not with folks like you who were just doing your job.

It's a real shame that the machinery of justice seems to move even slower than usual when well-connected banksters are involved. The FDIC, SEC, CFTC, etc. are notoriously impotent and underfunded, and the financial services lobby cuts across party lines to make strengthening regulations nearly impossible. The Dodd-Frank legislation was just a tiny step forward when leaps and bounds were needed to stop the continued plundering of middle class wealth by bankster thieves.

I haven't worked in the financial services sector since 2004, and even when I did, I worked for the most notoriously risk-averse mutual fund company out there, so I still had some sort of pride in the company, and a feeling that we were doing something valuable. These days, I'm almost inclined to believe the whole financial services industy is a sham. We need banks, but we don't need to be taking our best and brightest young people out of college and paying them six figures to move money around, skimming more than their fair share off the top. At least the auto companies, big agribusinesses, etc. make something, or provide some important service, but it seems like 99% of the financial sector is just about rent seeking and regulatory arbitrage, not reducing economic friction and improving the flow of capital.

Or, to put it more succinctly:

They consider 26 conference rooms excessive? In just one of the buildings on our campus we have 49 conference rooms and that doesn't include the hoteling center (and its multitude of rooms), auditorium, or dedicated training rooms.

I see plenty of office spaces that have nothing to do with banking that are a huge waste of money. I know some of the wellsfargo offices here are pretty crappy.

We had lots of empty space- but the rate of growth the bank was experiencing when they started the process for leasing the space kind of justified it, tbh.

If the bank was experiencing the growth it was without being negligent, I don't really think there was much problem with the nice building. Three airplane was probably a bit much (I got to ride in one once when evaluating a big software purchase in Houston and it was pretty convenient)- if it was justified at all you think one would have been enough.

We all got our standard bonuses (which are pretty big in the banking industry- small raises, but at the VP level, which I was, my bonus was something like 10% of my salary) even when things were starting to go south and our debt ratio was way off- this definitely gave me a lot of confidence at the time that the leadership was doing right and weren't just out for themselves.

In the end, the building wasn't THAT nice (imo) and the timing could've definitely been better (they'd been planning to do it long before the financial crisis), but the real issue isn't the fancy stuff- it's making bad loans and putting hundreds of smaller banks at risk when you take risks to pursue a high growth strategy. While I was at the bank, they bank never grew less than 10% in assets any year until the financial crisis hit, and most years it was far north of that (I was there maybe 2 years before the financial crisis, but I saw the number for the previous decade).