The Bear Stearns Companies, Inc. was an American
investment bank
Investment is the dedication of money to purchase of an asset to attain an increase in value over a period of time. Investment requires a sacrifice of some present asset, such as time, money, or effort.
In finance, the purpose of investing i ...
,
securities
A security is a tradable financial asset. The term commonly refers to any form of financial instrument, but its legal definition varies by jurisdiction. In some countries and languages people commonly use the term "security" to refer to any for ...
trading, and
brokerage firm
A broker is a person or firm who arranges transactions between a buyer and a seller for a commission when the deal is executed. A broker who also acts as a seller or as a buyer becomes a principal party to the deal. Neither role should be confu ...
that failed in 2008 as part of the
global financial crisis and recession. After its closure it was subsequently sold to
JPMorgan Chase
JPMorgan Chase & Co. is an American multinational investment bank and financial services holding company headquartered in New York City and incorporated in Delaware. As of 2022, JPMorgan Chase is the largest bank in the United States, the ...
. The company's main business areas before its failure were
capital markets, investment banking,
wealth management
Wealth management (WM) or wealth management advisory (WMA) is an investment advisory service that provides financial management and wealth advisory services to a wide array of clients ranging from affluent to high-net-worth (HNW) and ultra-high ...
, and global
clearing services, and it was heavily involved in the
subprime mortgage crisis.
In the years leading up to the failure, Bear Stearns was heavily involved in
securitization and issued large amounts of
asset-backed securities which were, in the case of mortgages, pioneered by
Lewis Ranieri
Lewis S. Ranieri (; born 1947) is a former bond trader, founding partner and current chairman of Ranieri Partners,http://www.ranieripartners.com/ranieri-senior-executive-team-1/lewis-s-ranieri a real estate firm. He is considered the "father" ...
, “the father of mortgage securities.” As investor losses mounted in those markets in 2006 and 2007, the company actually increased its exposure, especially to the mortgage-backed assets that were central to the
subprime mortgage crisis. In March 2008, the
Federal Reserve Bank of New York provided an emergency loan to try to avert a sudden collapse of the company. The company could not be saved, however, and was sold to JPMorgan Chase for $10 per share, a price far below its pre-crisis 52-week high of $133.20 per share, but not as low as the $2 per share originally agreed upon.
The collapse of the company was a prelude to the meltdown of the investment banking industry in the United States and elsewhere that culminated in September 2008, and the subsequent
global financial crisis of 2008–2009
Global means of or referring to a globe and may also refer to:
Entertainment
* ''Global'' (Paul van Dyk album), 2003
* ''Global'' (Bunji Garlin album), 2007
* ''Global'' (Humanoid album), 1989
* ''Global'' (Todd Rundgren album), 2015
* Bruno ...
. In January 2010, JPMorgan ceased using the Bear Stearns name.
History
![BearStearns](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/BearStearns.JPG)
Bear Stearns was founded as an
equity trading
A stock trader or equity trader or share trader, also called a stock investor, is a person or company involved in trading equity securities and attempting to profit from the purchase and sale of those securities. Stock traders may be an invest ...
house on May 1, 1923, by
Joseph Ainslie Bear
Joseph Ainslie Bear (May 28, 1878 – July 13, 1955) was an American banker who co-founded the investment bank Bear Stearns.
Biography
Bear was born to a Jewish family on May 28, 1878 in Louisville, Kentucky. He was educated in France, Germany, ...
,
Robert B. Stearns and Harold C. Mayer with $500,000 in capital (). Internal tensions quickly arose among the three founders. The firm survived the
Wall Street Crash of 1929
The Wall Street Crash of 1929, also known as the Great Crash, was a major American stock market crash that occurred in the autumn of 1929. It started in September and ended late in October, when share prices on the New York Stock Exchange coll ...
without laying off any employees and by 1933 opened its first branch office in
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
, image_map =
, map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago
, coordinates =
, coordinates_footnotes =
, subdivision_type = Country
, subdivision_name ...
. In 1955 the firm opened its first international office in
Amsterdam
Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the capital and most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population of 907,976 within the city proper, 1,558,755 in the urban ar ...
.
[
]
In 1985, Bear Stearns became a publicly traded company.
[ It served corporations, institutions, governments, and individuals. The company's business included corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, institutional equities, fixed income sales & risk management, trading and research, private client services, derivatives, foreign exchange and futures sales and trading, asset management, and custody services. Through Bear Stearns Securities Corp., it offered global clearing services to broker dealers, prime broker clients and other professional traders, including ]securities lending
In finance, securities lending or stock lending refers to the lending of securities by one party to another.
The terms of the loan will be governed by a "Securities Lending Agreement", which requires that the borrower provides the lender with c ...
.
Bear Stearns' World Headquarters was located at 383 Madison Avenue, between East 46th Street and East 47th Street in Manhattan
Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...
. By 2007, the company employed more than 15,500 people worldwide. The firm was headquartered in New York City with offices in Atlanta
Atlanta ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Georgia. It is the seat of Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia, but its territory falls in both Fulton and DeKalb counties. With a population of 498,715 ...
, Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
, Chicago, Dallas
Dallas () is the List of municipalities in Texas, third largest city in Texas and the largest city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the List of metropolitan statistical areas, fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States at 7.5 ...
, Denver
Denver () is a consolidated city and county, the capital, and most populous city of the U.S. state of Colorado. Its population was 715,522 at the 2020 census, a 19.22% increase since 2010. It is the 19th-most populous city in the Unit ...
, Houston
Houston (; ) is the most populous city in Texas, the most populous city in the Southern United States, the fourth-most populous city in the United States, and the sixth-most populous city in North America, with a population of 2,304,580 i ...
, Los Angeles
Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, largest city in the U.S. state, state of California and the List of United States cities by population, sec ...
, Irvine, San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...
, St. Louis
St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the bi-state metropolitan area, which e ...
; Whippany, New Jersey
Whippany is a Local government in New Jersey#Unincorporated communities, unincorporated community located within Hanover Township, New Jersey, Hanover Township in Morris County, New Jersey, Morris County, New Jersey, United States. Whippany's na ...
; and San Juan, Puerto Rico
San Juan (, , ; Spanish for "Saint John") is the capital city and most populous municipality in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, an unincorporated territory of the United States. As of the 2020 census, it is the 57th-largest city under the juri ...
. Internationally the firm had offices in London
London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...
, Beijing
}
Beijing ( ; ; ), alternatively romanized as Peking ( ), is the capital of the People's Republic of China. It is the center of power and development of the country. Beijing is the world's most populous national capital city, with over 21 ...
, Dublin
Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of the Wicklow Mountains range. At the 2016 c ...
, Frankfurt
Frankfurt, officially Frankfurt am Main (; Hessian: , " Frank ford on the Main"), is the most populous city in the German state of Hesse. Its 791,000 inhabitants as of 2022 make it the fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located on it ...
, Hong Kong
Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delta i ...
, Lugano
Lugano (, , ; lmo, label=Ticinese dialect, Ticinese, Lugan ) is a city and municipality in Switzerland, part of the Lugano District in the canton of Ticino. It is the largest city of both Ticino and the Italian-speaking southern Switzerland. Luga ...
, Milan
Milan ( , , Lombard: ; it, Milano ) is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the second-most populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of about 1.4 million, while its metropolitan city h ...
, São Paulo
São Paulo (, ; Portuguese for ' Saint Paul') is the most populous city in Brazil, and is the capital of the state of São Paulo, the most populous and wealthiest Brazilian state, located in the country's Southeast Region. Listed by the Ga ...
, Mumbai
Mumbai (, ; also known as Bombay — List of renamed Indian cities and states#Maharashtra, the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian States and union territories of India, state of Maharashtra and the ''de facto'' fin ...
, Shanghai
Shanghai (; , , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is one of the four direct-administered municipalities of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The city is located on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the Huangpu River flowin ...
, Singapore
Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, bor ...
and Tokyo
Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and List of cities in Japan, largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, ...
.
In 2005–2007, Bear Stearns was recognized as the "Most Admired" securities firm in '' Fortune'' "America's Most Admired Companies" survey, and second overall in the securities firm section. The annual survey is a prestigious ranking of employee talent, quality of risk management and business innovation. This was the second time in three years that Bear Stearns had achieved this "top" distinction.
Lead-up to the failure – increasing exposure to subprime mortgages
By November 2006, the company had total capital of approximately $66.7 billion and total assets of $350.4 billion and according to the April 2005 issue of '' Institutional Investor'' magazine, Bear Stearns was the seventh-largest securities firm in terms of total capital.
A year later Bear Stearns had notional contract amounts of approximately $13.40 trillion in derivative
In mathematics, the derivative of a function of a real variable measures the sensitivity to change of the function value (output value) with respect to a change in its argument (input value). Derivatives are a fundamental tool of calculus. ...
financial instruments, of which $1.85 trillion were listed futures and option contracts. In addition, Bear Stearns was carrying more than $28 billion in 'level 3' assets on its books at the end of fiscal 2007 versus a net equity position of only $11.1 billion. This $11.1 billion supported $395 billion in assets, which means a leverage ratio
In finance, leverage (or gearing in the United Kingdom and Australia) is any technique involving borrowing funds to buy things, hoping that future profits will be many times more than the cost of borrowing. This technique is named after a lever i ...
of 35.6 to 1. This highly leveraged balance sheet, consisting of many illiquid and potentially worthless assets, led to the rapid diminution of investor and lender confidence, which finally evaporated as Bear was forced to call the New York Federal Reserve to stave off the looming cascade of counterparty
A counterparty (sometimes contraparty) is a legal entity, unincorporated entity, or collection of entities to which an exposure of financial risk may exist. The word became widely used in the 1980s, particularly at the time of the Basel I deliberat ...
risk which would ensue from forced liquidation.
Start of the crisis – two subprime mortgage funds fail
On June 22, 2007, Bear Stearns pledged a collateralized loan of up to $3.2 billion to "bail out" one of its funds, the Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Fund, while negotiating with other banks to loan money against collateral to another fund, the Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Enhanced Leveraged Fund. Bear Stearns had originally put up just $25 million, so they were hesitant about the bailout; nonetheless, CEO James Cayne and other senior executives worried about the damage to the company's reputation. The funds were invested in thinly traded collateralized debt obligation
A collateralized debt obligation (CDO) is a type of structured asset-backed security (ABS). Originally developed as instruments for the corporate debt markets, after 2002 CDOs became vehicles for refinancing mortgage-backed securities (MBS).Le ...
s (CDOs). Merrill Lynch seized $850 million worth of the underlying collateral but only was able to auction $100 million of them. The incident sparked concern of contagion as Bear Stearns might be forced to liquidate its CDOs, prompting a mark-down of similar assets in other portfolios. Richard A. Marin, a senior executive at Bear Stearns Asset Management responsible for the two hedge funds, was replaced on June 29 by Jeffrey B. Lane, a former vice chairman of rival investment bank Lehman Brothers
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. ( ) was an American global financial services firm founded in 1847. Before filing for bankruptcy in 2008, Lehman was the fourth-largest investment bank in the United States (behind Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, a ...
.
During the week of July 16, 2007, Bear Stearns disclosed that the two subprime hedge funds had lost nearly all of their value amid a rapid decline in the market for subprime mortgages.
On August 1, 2007, investors in the two funds took action against Bear Stearns and its top board and risk management managers and officers. The law firms of Jake Zamansky & Associates and Rich & Intelisano both filed arbitration claims with the National Association of Securities Dealers
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) is a private American corporation that acts as a self-regulatory organization (SRO) that regulates member brokerage firms and exchange markets. FINRA is the successor to the National Associat ...
alleging that Bear Stearns misled investors about its exposure to the funds. This was the first legal action made against Bear Stearns. Co-President Warren Spector was asked to resign on August 5, 2007, as a result of the collapse of two hedge funds tied to subprime mortgages. A September 21 report in ''The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'' noted that Bear Stearns posted a 61 percent drop in net profits due to their hedge fund losses. With Samuel Molinaro's November 15th revelation that Bear Stearns was writing down a further $1.2 billion in mortgage-related securities and would face its first loss in 83 years, Standard & Poor's downgraded the company's credit rating
A credit rating is an evaluation of the credit risk of a prospective debtor (an individual, a business, company or a government), predicting their ability to pay back the debt, and an implicit forecast of the likelihood of the debtor defaulting.
...
from AA to A.
Matthew Tannin and Ralph R. Cioffi, both former managers of hedge funds at Bear Stearns, were arrested June 19, 2008. They faced criminal charges and were found not guilty of misleading investors about the risks involved in the subprime market. Tannin and Cioffi were also named in lawsuits brought by Barclays Bank
Barclays () is a British multinational universal bank, headquartered in London, England. Barclays operates as two divisions, Barclays UK and Barclays International, supported by a service company, Barclays Execution Services.
Barclays traces ...
, which claimed they were one of the many investors misled by the executives.
They were also named in civil lawsuits brought in 2007 by investors, including Barclays, who claimed they had been misled. Barclays claimed that Bear Stearns knew that certain assets in the Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Master Fund were worth much less than their professed values. The suit claimed that Bear Stearns managers devised "a plan to make more money for themselves and further to use the Enhanced Fund as a repository for risky, poor-quality investments". The lawsuit said Bear Stearns told Barclays that the enhanced fund was up almost 6% through June 2007—when "in reality, the portfolio's asset values were plummeting."[Ex-Bear Stearns managers arrested at their homes](_blank)
By Tom Hays, Associated Press, 6/19/08.
Other investors in the fund included Jeffrey E. Epstein's Financial Trust Company.
Fed bailout and sale to JPMorgan Chase
On March 14, 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York ("FRBNY") agreed to provide a $25 billion loan to Bear Stearns collateralized by unencumbered assets from Bear Stearns in order to provide Bear Stearns the liquidity for up to 28 days that the market was refusing to provide. Shortly thereafter, FRBNY had a change of heart and told Bear Stearns that the 28-day loan was unavailable to them. The deal was then changed to where FRBNY would create a company (what would become Maiden Lane LLC) to buy $30 billion worth of Bear Stearns' assets, and Bear Stearns would be purchased by JPMorgan Chase in a stock swap worth $2 a share, or less than 7 percent of Bear Stearns' market value just two days before.[Fed Aided Bear Stearns as Firm Faced Chapter 11, Bernanke Says](_blank)
Bloomberg, April 2, 2008 This sale price represented a staggering loss as its stock had traded at $172 a share as late as January 2007, and $93 a share as late as February 2008. Eventually, after renegotiating the purchase of Bear Stearns, Maiden Lane LLC was funded by a $29 billion first priority loan from FRBNY and a $1 billion subordinated loan from JPMorgan Chase, without further recourse to JPMorgan Chase. The structure of the transaction, with both loans collateralized by securitized home mortgages and with the JPMorgan Chase loan bearing losses before the FRBNY loan, meant that FRBNY could not seize or otherwise encumber JPMorgan Chase's assets if the underlying collateral became insufficient to repay the FRBNY loan. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke defended the bailout by stating that a bankruptcy of Bear Stearns would have affected the real economy
The real economy concerns the production, purchase and flow of goods and services (like oil, bread and labour) within an economy. It is contrasted with the financial economy, which concerns the aspects of the economy that deal purely in transac ...
and could have caused a "chaotic unwinding" of investments across US markets.
On March 20, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox said the collapse of Bear Stearns was due to a lack of confidence, not a lack of capital. Cox noted that Bear Stearns' problems escalated when rumors spread about its liquidity crisis In financial economics, a liquidity crisis is an acute shortage of ''liquidity''. Liquidity may refer to market liquidity (the ease with which an asset can be converted into a liquid medium, e.g. cash), funding liquidity (the ease with which borrow ...
which in turn eroded investor confidence in the firm. "Notwithstanding that Bear Stearns continued to have high quality collateral to provide as security for borrowings, market counterparties became less willing to enter into collateralized funding arrangements with Bear Stearns", said Cox. Bear Stearns' liquidity pool started at $18.1 billion on March 10 and then plummeted to $2 billion on March 13. Ultimately market rumors about Bear Stearns' difficulties became self-fulfilling, Cox said.
On March 24, 2008, a class action
A class action, also known as a class-action lawsuit, class suit, or representative action, is a type of lawsuit where one of the parties is a group of people who are represented collectively by a member or members of that group. The class actio ...
suit was filed on behalf of shareholders, challenging the terms of JPMorgan's acquisition of Bear Stearns. That same day, a new agreement was reached that raised JPMorgan Chase's offer to $10 a share, up from the initial $2 offer, which meant an offer of $1.2 billion. The revised deal was aimed to quiet upset investors and was necessitated by what was characterized as loophole in a guarantee that was open-ended, despite the fact that the deal required shareholder approval. While it was not clear if JPMorgan's lawyers, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz
Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz is an American law firm in New York City. The firm is known for corporate law, regularly handling large and complex transactions. On both a profit per lawyer, and profit per equity partner basis, it is the most p ...
, were to blame for the mistake in the hastily written contract, JPMorgan's CEO, Jamie Dimon, was described as being "apoplectic" about the mistake. The Bear Stearns bailout was seen as an extreme-case scenario, and continues to raise significant questions about Fed intervention. On April 8, 2008, former Fed chairman Paul Volcker
Paul Adolph Volcker Jr. (September 5, 1927 – December 8, 2019) was an American economist who served as the 12th chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987. During his tenure as chairman, Volcker was widely credited with having ended th ...
stated that the Fed had taken actions that "extend to the very edge of its lawful and implied powers." See his remarks at a luncheon of the Economic Club of New York. On May 29, Bear Stearns shareholders approved the sale to JPMorgan Chase at the $10-per-share price.
An article by journalist Matt Taibbi
Matthew Colin Taibbi (; born March 2, 1970) is an American author, journalist, and podcaster. He has reported on finance, media, politics, and sports. A former contributing editor for ''Rolling Stone'', he is an author of several books, co-host o ...
for ''Rolling Stone
''Rolling Stone'' is an American monthly magazine that focuses on music, politics, and popular culture. It was founded in San Francisco, California, in 1967 by Jann Wenner, and the music critic Ralph J. Gleason. It was first known for its ...
'' contended that naked short selling
Naked short selling, or naked shorting, is the practice of short-selling a tradable asset of any kind without first borrowing the asset from someone else or ensuring that it can be borrowed. When the seller does not obtain the asset and deli ...
had a role in the demise of both Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. A study by finance researchers at the University of Oklahoma Price College of Business studied trading in financial stocks, including Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and found "no evidence that stock price declines were caused by naked short selling." ''Time
Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, ...
'' magazine also labelled former Bear Sterns head James Cayne
James E. "Jimmy" Cayne (February 14, 1934 – December 28, 2021) was an American businessman and CEO of Bear Stearns. In 2006, he became the first Wall Street chief to own a company stake worth more than $1 billion, but he lost most of that in t ...
as the CEO most responsible out of all the CEOs who "screwed up Wall Street" during the Financial crisis of 2007–2008
Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services (the discipline of fi ...
, even reporting that "none seemed more asleep at the switch than Bear Stearns' Cayne."
Structure prior to collapse
Managing partners/chief executive officers
* Salim L. Lewis: 1949–1978
* Alan C. Greenberg
Alan Courtney "Ace" Greenberg (September 3, 1927 – July 25, 2014) was a chairman of the executive committee of Bear Stearns, The Bear Stearns Companies, Inc.
Early life and education
Greenberg was born in Wichita, Kansas but raised in Oklahom ...
: 1978–1993
* James Cayne
James E. "Jimmy" Cayne (February 14, 1934 – December 28, 2021) was an American businessman and CEO of Bear Stearns. In 2006, he became the first Wall Street chief to own a company stake worth more than $1 billion, but he lost most of that in t ...
: 1993–2008
* Alan Schwartz: 2008
Major shareholders
The largest Bear Stearns shareholders as of December 2007 were:[ Retrieved on September 30, 2008.]
* Barrow Hanley Mewhinney & Strauss – 9.73%
* Joseph C. Lewis – 9.36%
* Morgan Stanley
Morgan Stanley is an American multinational investment management and financial services company headquartered at 1585 Broadway in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. With offices in more than 41 countries and more than 75,000 employees, the fir ...
– 5.37%
* James Cayne
James E. "Jimmy" Cayne (February 14, 1934 – December 28, 2021) was an American businessman and CEO of Bear Stearns. In 2006, he became the first Wall Street chief to own a company stake worth more than $1 billion, but he lost most of that in t ...
– 4.94%
* Legg Mason Capital Management – 4.84%
* Private Capital Management – 4.49%
* Barclays Global Investors
BlackRock, Inc. is an American multi-national investment company based in New York City. Founded in 1988, initially as a risk management and fixed income institutional asset manager, BlackRock is the world's largest asset manager, with trill ...
– 3.10%
* State Street Global Advisors – 3.01%
* The Vanguard Group
The Vanguard Group, Inc. is an American registered investment advisor based in Malvern, Pennsylvania, with about $7 trillion in global assets under management, as of January 13, 2021. It is the largest provider of mutual funds and the second-la ...
– 2.67%
* Janus Capital Management – 2.34%
See also
* Primary dealer
A primary dealer is a firm that buys government securities directly from a government, with the intention of reselling them to others, thus acting as a market maker of government securities. The government may regulate the behaviour and number of ...
* Bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers
The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, was the climax of the subprime mortgage crisis. After the financial services firm was notified of a pending credit downgrade due to its heavy position in subprime mortgages, the Federal ...
* Bear Stearns Merchant Banking
Irving Place Capital, formerly known as Bear Stearns Merchant Banking (BSMB), is an American private equity firm focused on leveraged buyout and growth capital investments in middle-market companies in the industrial, packaging, consumer and reta ...
References
Further reading
* William Cohan, '' House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street'', 2010.
External links
JPMorgan Securities home page
* ttps://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/03/17/business/20080317_BEAR_STEARNS_GRAPHIC.html ''The New York Times'' Timeline of Bear Stearns' history
Bloomberg: JPMorgan Chase to Buy Bear Stearns for $240 Million
J.P. Morgan Buys Bear in Fire Sale, As Fed Widens Credit to Avert Crisis - WSJ
{{Authority control
JPMorgan Chase
1923 establishments in New York (state)
2000s in economic history
2008 mergers and acquisitions
2008 disestablishments in New York (state)
American companies established in 1923
Financial services companies established in 1923
Banks established in 1923
Financial services companies disestablished in 2008
Banks disestablished in 2008
Companies based in New York City
Former investment banks of the United States
Investment management companies of the United States