Bear Stearns

This week has been all about history-changing events: Washington is asking for the biggest bailout for Wall Street ever; a presidential candidate “suspended” his campaign because he’s too busy campaigning via TV interviews; and now, after the implosions of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual enters the [...]

The always interesting Big Picture blog has culled together quotes and analysis from today’s NY Sun and other sources documenting Lee Pickard, the former director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s trading and markets division, admitting that the current stock market tumble and credit crisis can be directly attributed to a purposeful SEC exemption that was given to five firms. Those five firms? Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and the now-belly-up Lehman Bros., Merrill Lynch, and Bear Stearns.

A nation of whiners? Or a seriously decimated economy? The nation’s leading economists say it’s the latter, and the already crumbling financial sector is due for a series of crippling aftershocks that could last well into the next decade. Once-leading lenders Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Merrill, Lehman, and AIG have perished in only seven days, all on the heels of the IndyMac collapse and $29 billion Bear Stearns bailout. And experts say more lenders are expected to fall in the near future, some even this week.

Good Friday? Maybe if you’re Warren Buffett. He got a bump of $10 billion last year; homeowners saw their home prices plummet by 10 percent. So what happens when equity gets all dried up?

Well, according to the economic experts in some of the stories linked below, it looks like the death knell could linger for [...]