The getaway car

In a flashback to the Savings & Loan Crisis (or the Great Depression, if you were around then), people were actually lining up to take their money out of Countrywide Bank Thursday.

Fears about parent company Countrywide Financial Corp.'s trouble funding loans include talk of bankruptcy, which has people worried their savings will disappear. That's despite assurances from Countrywide Bank that it's well capitalized, with $107 billion in assets, and that deposits are FDIC insured.

One customer who was not reassured was Bill Ashmore, president of Impac Mortgage Holdings, an Alt-A mortgage lender that has posted $274.2 million in losses so far this year. The L.A. Times was there as Ashmore drove up to the bank's Laguna Niguel office in his Porsche SUV to withdraw $500,000.

"It's got my wife totally freaked out," Ashmore told the Times as he waited half an hour in line to cash out his account. "I just don't want to deal with it. I don't care about losing 90 days' interest, I don't care if it's FDIC-insured — I just want it out."

Ashmore said he was wiring the money to Bank of America. Today Bank of America's sister company, Banc of America Securities, upgraded Countrywide Financial's stock from sell to neutral, saying the lender's draw down of an $11.5 billion line of credit should buy the company time while the turmoil in the secondary market for mortgage loans subsides.

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