An article on Michael Dell's business empire outside his computer company includes this:
Perhaps MSD's most prominent deal came in 2008, in the middle of the financial crisis, when it joined a consortium that acquired the assets of the collapsed mortgage lender IndyMac Bank from the federal government for about $13.9 billion and renamed it OneWest Bank.
The OneWest purchase has been wildly successful. Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman executive who led the OneWest deal, has said that the bank is expected to consider an initial public offering this year. An I.P.O. would generate big profits for Mr. Dell and his co-investors, according to people briefed on the deal.
"Collapsed" is arguably a misleading term for what in fact happened to IndyMac. Maybe this article on Michael Dell isn't the right place for a fuller explanation, but on the other hand, the term "collapsed" doesn't fully capture it. A CNN article reports what did happen. Senator Schumer wrote and released a June 26, 2008 letter to regulators warning that he was "concerned that IndyMac's financial deterioration poses significant risks to both taxpayers and borrowers." In the following 11 business days, depositors withdrew more than $1.3 billion from their accounts, and the federal Office of Thrift Supervision proceeded to seize it and to turn it over to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
Mr. Schumer argues that the bank was in trouble before his letter became public. And it's certainly possible that Mr. Mnuchin and the management team he brought in added value by managing the bank better and restoring confidence in it. I'm not faulting him for seeing value where others did not. But one can also argue that the remarkable recovery of IndyMac under the OneWest name demonstrates that — like the once "toxic," now golden mortgage-backed securities — there was more value in these assets than either regulators or the press recognized at the time.
All of this is a long way of saying that "collapsed" is a shorthand for a story about this financial institution that makes it seem like it fell down on its own. In fact regulators and politicians made a decision not to prop up the owners, and instead decided to take it over. If they had left it alone, maybe it would have recovered on its own. Maybe it wouldn't have. Maybe it would have failed on its own, or the owners, under distress, would have decided to sell it at a bargain price without the intervention of a senator or the Office of Thrift Supervision.
The article would have been better if some editor had just deleted the word "collapsed."