The Securities and Exchange Commission, or NAMBLA for short, is focusing its resources on an investigation of whether gossiping short sellers hastened the collapses of Lehman and Bear Stearns by spreading rumors. The SEC is looking into a variety of rumors that spread in the days and months before the companies collapsed, including suggestions that some counter-parties had stopped trading with the firms.
I'll quote DealBreaker's brilliant commentary on the collapse of Bear Stearns:
Let's just say they did spread the rumors, which I don't believe they did (and, as an aside: if a company can be brought down by the corporate equivalent of 7th grade girls passing notes in class, perhaps it doesn't deserve to be in existence anyway).It's a shame that the SEC is tossing its very limited resources into wild goose chases that serve to intimidate the people who were smart enough to predict trouble at companies like Bear and Lehman, long before either company was giving investors the full story.
In the end, the short sellers were proven right because Lehman was insolvent, and a buyer couldn't even be found at $1. You can only blame the company's management for creating that mess.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-02-2008 @ 12:40PM
jd said...
The rest of the big banks are borderline insolvent: C, BAC, JPM. BAC paid way too much for CFC and MER, yet its stock price is closer to its annual high than its annual low. C was the talk of insolvency in June, yet it buys another insolvent bank (for too much) and people think it's great. JPM got Bear Stearns and WaMu, yet its stock price doesn't reflect the bad debt.