Murder on Wall Street? Bryan Burrough has a terrific, blow by blow account of the death of Bear Stearns in the August Vanity Fair. This is a great read. It will confirm all your darkest suspicions about the financial chicanery going on behind our backs.
:popcorn:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/08/bear_stearns200808Bringing Down Bear Stearns"On Monday, March 10, the rumor started: Bear Stearns was having liquidity problems. In fact, the maverick investment bank had around $18 billion in cash reserves. But soon the speculation created its own reality, and the race was on to keep Bear’s crisis from ravaging Wall Street. With the blow-by-blow from insiders, Bryan Burrough follows the players—Bear’s stunned executives, trigger-happy reporters at CNBC, a nervous Fed, a shadowy group of short-sellers—in what some believe was the greatest financial scandal in history.
by Bryan Burrough August 2008."
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"Vanity Fair's recent exposé on the collapse of Bear Stearns seems to be having more of an impact in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, where business news station CNBC is located, than on Wall Street.
The article by Bryan Burrough, author of "Barbarians at the Gate," suggests some short-sellers may have intentionally tried to drive Bear down by spreading rumors about the firm - and that the business station helped usher in the collapse by fanning the flames.
"Overall people think the article exaggerated the role of CNBC," said a CNBC staffer who asked not to be identified.
Charlie Gasparino, one of the CNBC reporters mentioned in Burrough's story, said: "CNBC didn't report rumors. What we were talking about was market activity. . . In those critical hours we were reporting what was happening in the markets. What are we going to do? Ignore it?"
http://www.nypost.com/seven/07112008/business/cnbcs_ticked_at_vanity_fair_119441.htm - - - - - - - -
http//www.deepcapture.com/vanity-fair-reports-greatest-financial-scandal-in-history
"More than a few veteran Wall Streeters believe an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission will uncover evidence that
was the victim of a gigantic “bear raid”—that is, a malicious attack brought by so-called short-sellers, the vultures of Wall Street, who make bets that a firm’s stock will go down.”
According to Vanity Fair, the SEC is investigating short-sellers who “employed a complex scheme to force a handful of major Wall Street firms to hold up trades with Bear, then leaked the news to the media, creating an artificial panic.”
People on Wall Street are calling this “the greatest financial scandal in history,” Vanity Fair reports.
The magazine argues, just as Deep Capture did a few days ago, that CNBC’s David Faber facilitated this scandal. The magazine describes Faber’s appalling interview with Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz as follows:
Faber’s first question was a bombshell. He told Schwartz he had direct knowledge of a trader – a single trader – whose credit department had held up a trade with Bear Stearns, citing concerns about its health. At Bear, many executives gasped. It was a killer statement: Faber was saying, in essence, that Bear’s status as a trader, the basis of its business, was in question….only later did Faber say on-air the trade in question had finally gone through. But the damage had been done.
‘You knew right at that moment that Bear Stearns was dead, right at the moment he asked that question,’ a Wall Street trader of 40 years told me. ‘Once you raise that idea, that the firm can’t follow through on a trade, it’s over. Faber killed him. He just killed him.’
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