What's next for Sheila Bair?

Joe Nocera has a wonderful debriefing of just-retired FDIC head Sheila Bair, who fought the good fight on behalf of depositors, mortgagees and taxpayers in the runup to the financial meltdown and throughout it -- fighting unsuccessfully to rein in subprime lending and for effective mortgage modification, and successfully for strong resolution authority in Dodd-Frank to wind down failing megabanks.  Throughout, she was an advocate for market accountability -- that is, for bank bondholders and mortgage holders to absorb a portion of the losses caused by mortgages gone bad and banks gone bust. Nocera also credits her with staving off U.S. adoption of Basel II, the loophole-ridden standard for bank capital requirements that enabled European banks to put themselves in even worse shape than American ones.

Perhaps the article is spun this way, but as Bair delivers her own postmortem it's hard not to speculate about her future:

From financial shotgun marriages, miscarriages

Perhaps Federal takeovers of large banks ain't so easy. A little foretaste in fallout from the FDIC-directed shotgun marriage of Washington Mutual to JP Morgan Chase. From American Lawyer's Litigation Daily:

Battle Brewing over Fire Sale of WaMu Banking Assets

In one sense, at least, Lehman Brothers's precipitous Chapter 11 filing was a blessing in (very heavy) disguise: The investment bank was involved in the sale of its assets in the days and weeks after it entered bankruptcy. Washington Mutual wasn't as fortunate. Seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on September 25 last year, the bank had no control over the disposition of its core banking assets, which were quickly sold to JPMorgan Chase & Co. for $1.9 billion.

Now that hasty sale has become the subject of what promises to be protracted litigation. At its core is a question: What, exactly, did JP Morgan buy on that fall day?

Both sides are suing the FDIC, with WaMu's holding company "seeking to recover billions of dollars in tax refunds, capital contributions, and trust securities," while JPM looks to ""protect its economic interests in the assets."

Now, imagine those spats cubed in the wind-down of a global bank with assets and counterparties on every continent. The FT's John Gapper offers a preview.