Lets not forget how Chase Bank was able to "buy" WAMU for what turned out to be a dollar or two a share even though WAMU had huge assets at the time. The shareholders at the time of the WAMU Chase merger lost all of their stock value when the merger happened.
The WAMU Chase merger had to do with the Bush administration. It's almost as if the Barack Obama administration wanted to have their own dollar a share company the way the Bush administration did. It's as if they were thinking, "If the Bush administration can orchestrate a huge take over of a company and destroy shareholder equity overnight, we can too"...