Rainier Pacific Bank brought down by a big investment gone bad [Seattle Times]

Seattle Times has some interesting background on its local bank, Rainier Pacific, that failed on Friday. I didn't know that Rainier Pacific used to be a credit union. Also interesting is what had caused its financial problems. According to the article:

it was a large and spectacularly ill-timed investment in complex securities called trust preferred collateralized debt obligations — bundles of debt issued by banks and insurance companies, similar to the instruments at the root of the financial meltdown

For more details about all the institutions closed on Friday, refer to my bank failure review post.