Bankruptcy

Great Series of Articles in WSJ re: Bear Stearns Bailout

By J. Michael McBride

Here is a quote from one of the 3 part series of articles from the Wall Street Journal about the Bear Stearns bail out:

"Directors authorized an emergency bankruptcy filing, but Mr. Schwartz still held out hope that a rescue could be arranged. A bankruptcy filing for Bear Stearns -- with its nearly 400 different subsidiaries -- would be immensely complicated. If the firm could make it through Friday, executives believed, they could come up with a more tenable fix to their problems.

Around midnight, Matt Zames, a senior J.P. Morgan trader, arrived with a team to look over Bear Stearns's books. The group appeared stunned by its financial position. "We need to talk to the Fed," said Mr. Zames. "Where are they?" Bear Stearns officials directed them down the hall to the firm's legal library, where officials from the New York Fed had been gathered for several hours.

Back in Mr. Molinaro's sixth-floor conference room, he and Mr. Schwartz, who hadn't had time for dinner, ate slices of cold pizza out of the box under a picture recalling flush times: A lithograph of The Wall Street Journal marked the day in 1999 that the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 10,000 with the headline, "If This Is a Bubble, It Sure Is Hard to Pop."

By early Friday morning March 14, Bear Stearns's managers were running out of steam. No clear solution had yet emerged. It appeared to some that the firm might go under that day. Bear Stearns's financing team -- whose job it was to replenish the firm's operational funding by making new lending agreements each morning -- began dutifully dialing creditors. On the sixth floor, there was talk of ordering breakfast from Dunkin' Donuts.

At 5 a.m., Mr. Geithner convened a conference call with top government officials, including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr., to discuss the fallout from allowing the brokerage to collapse. They saw ripples spreading to thousands of firms world-wide that would involve trillions of dollars and take days to sort out. As the meeting wore on past the hour mark, Mr. Geithner warned that time was running out. Certain important credit markets were about to open. "What's it going to be?" he demanded.

At about 6:45 a.m., Bear Stearns officials received an email from Stephen Cutler, J.P. Morgan's general counsel. It was the draft of a news release announcing that the bank had agreed to provide Bear Stearns with financing "as necessary" for up to 28 days.
The money underwriting the rescue was coming from the Fed, which was also bearing the risk of the loan. It was the first time since the Great Depression that the Fed had made a loan like this to an entity other than a bank.

Here is a link to these articles:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121193290927324603.html?mod=sphere_ts&mod=sphere_wd

Michael

Full post as published by Texas Lawyer Blog on June 03, 2008 (boomark / email).