wsj on the fall of bear stearns

The Journal has been running its three-part series on the fall of Bear Stearns, and it's absolutely worth reading, assuming you have a reasonable amount of stomach lining to spare. Worth quoting at length, this excerpt about the Sunday night conference call between a group of "Wall Street CEOs" (the Journal's words, not mine) discussing the (then) $2 per share buy out of Bear by J.P. Morgan...

Messrs. Geithner and Dimon led off with some brief remarks, noting that J.P. Morgan would be guaranteeing Bear Stearns's debts and that if the pact hadn't come together, the market impact may have been catastrophic. During the question-and-answer session, Citigroup Inc.'s new CEO, Vikram Pandit, spoke up.

Mr. Pandit -- who did not initially identify himself -- asked a shrewd but technical question: How would the deal affect the risk to Bear Stearns's trading partners on certain long-term contracts?

The query irked Mr. Dimon. "Who is this?" he snapped. Mr. Pandit identified himself as "Vikram." Offended that Mr. Pandit was taking up time with what he considered granular inquiries, Mr. Dimon shot back, "Stop being such a jerk." He added that Citigroup "should thank us" for staving off further mayhem on Wall Street.

The online feature has all sorts of video and links to archived stories about the fall.

Comments

[Martin Edic]

Michael, unfortunately this article is behind the paid firewall at WSJ...

[Michael Sippey]

@martin -- that's too bad. I would highly recommend subscribing, it's a great newspaper and until they open it up to everyone, it's worth the annual subscription fee.

[Karl]

I just wanted to mention that if you want to get around the subscription wall, you just need to click to the article through the Google News site. Here's the search I used, and I believe the first two parts are the top two articles:

http://news.google.com/news?as_q=bear+stearns&svnum=10&as_scoring=r&hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_drrb=q&as_qdr=&as_mind=29&as_minm=4&as_maxd=29&as_maxm=5&as_nsrc=Wall+Street+Journal&as_nloc=&geo=&as_occt=any&aq=3&oq=wall+stree

[Michael Sippey]

@karl -- cool! thanks for that url.

[Martin Edic]

It's the only paper I still read as a paper, at lunch. Really feels like a guilty pleasure to buy dead trees.

[Michael Sippey]

Martin -- I love the paper version of the Journal, esp in its new format, though I don't buy it every day. Probably once a week or so...

[Alan]

Great post. Thanks for the info.