SIGH OF RELIEF...

Sept. 25 (Bloomberg) -- JPMorgan Chase & Co., the third- biggest U.S. bank by assets, agreed to acquire the deposits of Washington Mutual Inc. as the thrift was seized by regulators in the biggest bank failure in U.S. history.

JPMorgan will pay $1.9 billion, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said in a statement today. It won't acquire liabilities including claims by equity, subordinated and senior debt holders, the FDIC said.

WaMu, based in Seattle, collapsed after its credit rating was slashed to junk and potential suitors passed on making a bid. Facing $19 billion of losses on soured mortgage loans, the lender put itself up for sale last week. WaMu in March rebuffed a takeover offer from JPMorgan that WaMu valued at $4 a share.

``JPMorgan is getting a steal compared with what they were going to pay,'' said Scott Adams, a pension and investment analyst at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in Oakland, California, which owns WaMu shares. ``It's very tragic.''

The lender is the latest victim of a credit crunch that forced Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. into bankruptcy, drove Merrill Lynch & Co. to sell itself to Bank of America Corp. and brought about the Federal Reserve-financed purchase of Bear Stearns Cos. by JPMorgan. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's $700 billion plan to prop up the U.S. banking industry by buying distressed mortgages wasn't enough to save the company.

WaMu had about 2,300 branches and $182 billion of customer deposits at the end of June. Its $310 billion of assets dwarf those of Continental Illinois Corp., previously the largest failed bank, which had $40 billion ($83 billion in 2008 dollars) when it was taken over in 1984.