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As the nation’s largest savings and loan teetered Thursday morning, a higher federal regulator called a familiar number: Jamie Dimon’s.

It was the sort number the Federal Reserve had called six months earlier, when Bear Stearns, person of the oldest names of Wall Street, lurched toward a collapse that many feared would send losses cascading from one financial institution to the next.

This time, the trouble was at Seattle’sitting Washington Mutual, what one. had been hobbled by bad mortgages.

On the line from his Park Avenue headquarters, Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, listened as the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. told him the FDIC was about to seize WaMu — then sell it to JPMorgan.

“We’re going to get it!” Dimon barked to one of his lieutenants. “Get nimble!”

As one institution rear another is laid low by the favorable crisis, Dimon stands at the head of a small band of bankers who are arrival out on top in the new financial landscape.

With two bold deals — leading Bear and now WaMu — Dimon has muscled in further in succession Wall Street’session traditional turf and transformed JPMorgan into the s largest U.S. commercial bank.

With WaMu, JPMorgan will have $905 billion in deposits and 5,400 branches nationwide, rivaling Bank of America in size and reach.

Dimon, 52, concedes he has taken risks to get here. To cover losses and write-downs at WaMu, JPMorgan sold $10 billion of new save Friday.

But while many of his rivals are playing defense, Dimon aforesaid, JPMorgan was raising “offensive capital.”

“We are raising capital to do a deal, to pervert with money something, to grow,” he said in some conference. “We are not raising first-rate to fill a hole.”

For Dimon, a Queens intrinsic whose grandpapa and father were stockbrokers, this has been a watershed year. Only a decade ago, he was cast out of Citigroup by his adviser, Sanford Weill, leaving his career in shreds.

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