Last Wednesday, a bunch of peeved mortgagees protesting government favoritism in the Bear Stearns case entered the lobby of the company’s (soon-to-be-former) headquarters building in midtown Manhattan. While it might not seem like much, I view the symbolic “penetration” of this corporate stronghold as the very first sign of a much broader citizen revolt against the extraordinary protections being shown to crapped-out investment banker boyz…
April 10th, 2008 | James Howard Kunstler | 7 comments | ContinuedAll Posts Tagged With: "Bear Stearns"
The Kindness of Strangers in the East is Waning
The background for this latest crisis is what we’ve been reckoning within these Daily Reckonings for so many months. The geniuses at Bear Stearns had their calculators…their Black Sholes Option Pricing Model…their mathematicians…their risk figures… They had some of the finest minds in the country - or at least, some of the finest minds money could buy on Wall Street.
March 18th, 2008 | Bill Bonner | 0 comments | Continued
Fed’s Latest Line of Attack on the Credit Crisis is Inflationary
Bear Stearns was on the receiving end of an indirect loan from the Federal Reserve on Friday. Though Bear is the fifth-largest securities firm in the U.S. (and the ninth largest bank in the world), it’s an investment bank, not a commercial lender. The Fed can’t loan directly to investment banks, so the loan had to be routed through a willing third-party, in this case JP Morgan. It turns out that last week’s big US$200 billion loan facility was probably set up to make this three-way transaction possible.
March 17th, 2008 | Dan Denning | 4 comments | Continued