here is an inside tip...
track back to the sources, retail lending is obvious but if you want to make an educated guess look at the history of a company from the wholesale (affiliate channel) history
when the banking institutions had more problems selling mbs investments to wall street, many of the banks pulled hard on the reigns on wholesale business to protect themselves due to the amount of fraud and to match mbs guidelines. they would only do retail because they had control of what was coming in and could regulate themselves. but many stayed in the game late because so many places were shutting down and they wanted to be the source for funding...first to go was pure wholesalers, investment firms and now as we are experiencing, retail banking hits
there are many banks that deal in the secondary market without a retail presence so it is hard to tell from a consumer standpoint...just knowing they didn't do RETAIL subprime is some info, check the history and ANY banking institution that kept correspondent and wholesale channels open is in deep shit, even if they closed late...CW, Indy, Wachovia (all victims). Most consumers that banked with large companies have confidence because for the most part retail lending divisions only do A-paper, "good loans" but most people do not know that the same banks that are strict have heavy investments/wholesale channels in subprime and Alt-A ex. most people felt safe with WAMU
If you look at this list on
http://ml-implode.com you will see the fall as described, first the wholesale channel fails, then correspondent channel then finally the retail side will fall. Even though that list is not of big banks, many of the bigger banks and unions have investments in those subs and now the public is feeling the fallout
My safe list
BofA
Wells
USB
Chase
Wamu may fail still..