Apr
04
Who is to blame for the Bear Stearns collapse?
Bear Stearns president and CEO Alan Schwartz has taken a leaf out of the books of former Enron chief Kenneth Lay who complained that business journalists were persecuting his company and Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo who targeted the "left wing anti business press".
In his prepared testimony for the Congressional hearing, Schwartz assigns blame on how "the unprecedented speed at which rumors and speculation travel and echo through the modern financial media environment" ensuring that "the rumors and speculation became a self-fulfilling prophecy", reports Muckraked.
As with Enron and Countrywide, the Bear Stearns blame game is like that. Everyone else's fault except their own.
Clearly the Bear execs took on more risk than they understood. You could make the argument that Bear common stock shareholders should have gotten zero.