WaMu!

“It was the Wild West,” said Steven M. Knobel, a founder of an appraisal company, Mitchell, Maxwell & Jackson, that did business with WaMu until 2007. “If you were alive, they would give you a loan. Actually, I think if you were dead, they would still give you a loan.”

The New York Times has a lengthy report on the nation's most incredible bank, which collapsed this fall under an avalanche of loans that the bank extended to customers it knew could not pay.