A wide swath of investors are going to be harmed by this, but the FDIC fund is going to come out of this unscathed. That’s the happy part.

—Chip MacDonald, a partner in the capital markets group at Jones day in Atlanta

WaMu’s collapse, the largest U.S. bank failure, came at a “zero cost” to the insurance fund for deposits, said FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair in an interview with Bloomberg Television. A “clean, seamless transfer” of the Seattle-based lender’s banking unit helped shield the $45 billion fund, Bair said.