Stop, Thief: Bear Stearns Chairman Will Walk Away With $13.4 Million

Professional rich asshole: Nice work if you can get it.
Nothing like corporate welfare. After getting a $30 billion federal bailout (Billions for Billionaires! Nothing for Have Nothings, aka The Rest of Us!) and selling his company for pennies on the dollar (bankrupting employees and stockholders in the process) Bear Stearns Chairman James Cayne will walk away with millions. $13.4 million on top of the $232 million he earned from 1993 to 2006 (and whatever he earned in 2007 and this year).

NYTimes: Sale Price Reflects the Depth of Bear’s Problems

James E. Cayne, Bear Stearns’s former chief executive and one of its largest individual shareholders, will most likely walk away with a little more than $13.4 million, the value of his Bear stock holdings, according to James F. Redda & Associates. Those would have been worth $1.2 billion in January 2007, when Bear’s stock was trading at a $171.51. Mr. Cayne has taken home more than $232 million in salary, bonus and other pay between 1993 and 2006, the time period for which there is publicly available data, according to Equilar, an as an executive compensation research firm.

No wonder he didn't want to leave his bridge tournament as his company and his 14,000 employees went down the drain. He had nothing to worry about. The feds aren't going to go after his cushy life. It's just business! Rich guy's business. The ones against health care for the rest of us, or food for the poor, but when their bottom lines are at risk their hands are fully outstretched.

The best post I saw all day on Bear Stearns (by Athenae at First Draft) is applicable here. Why can't the government take that $13.4 million? Hasn't he already got enough? Didn't we just give him $30 billion for nothing? Can't we take some of his money, if not his stuff? Why not?

Does Bear Stearns have a big screen TV?

What about bling? Any bling they could sell?

Couldn't Bear Stearns just get a job, already? I mean, I know of six or seven places that are hiring. I don't know what they pay, but surely it would be enough to keep them in sneakers and Xbox games.

I mean, just last week I heard that when we bailed out the airlines, jewelry sales at Wal-Mart went up 1400 percent. I didn't see it myself, but my cousins told me they heard it from somebody who knows somebody who works there, and it was like Christmas morning when those government checks cleared. What can you expect, really, from people trained in government dependency, I guess, but it still pisses me off, because that's my money. Fucking leeches.

Let me ask those questions, those questions we ask of every beneficiary of the smallest drop of government assistance. Let me ask why this is the ONLY scenario in which our parsimonious bullshit about personal responsibility, about choices and consequences, about "survival of the fittest" and other forms of sicko math, need not fucking apply.

Let me ask just how the unholy fuck it is that we can quibble every single day for hours over lunches that would feed a small village for a week about the ten dollars a year we give to some social program and how it's going to waste because somebody fed us an anecdote about somebody somewhere faking their need. Let me ask just how the bloody fucking blue hell we can get all worked up over how the homeless people downtown don't deserve our pennies because one of them said something rude to us on the way out of a store, and how they're just gonna spend our 65 cents on booze and then pee on the stoop. Let me ask how on earth we can take all the time it takes to think up all the ways we think up to sit in judgement on every individual case we hear about, about how that person just didn't work harder, didn't suffer enough, didn't earn "our" money, didn't deserve "our" charity, didn't bleed in front of us enough, and all the while, all the fucking while, we give it away by the millions and never ask where it goes. All the while.

Let me just ask. I'm sure somebody out there has the answer. After all, they had reasons why Katrina victims deserved to drown and die, be forced from their homes and screwed by their insurance companies and disregarded by their country. They had reasons why uninsured children didn't deserve health care, why those who died from a lack of medical attention only got what they had coming. They had reasons why the people who came to emergency rooms were just looking for drugs, they had reasons why thieves got rich and saints got shot, they had all kinds of explanations for everything that looked to everybody else like a fucking problem we needed somebody to solve. I'm sure the answers here are just as simple, just as easy.

But I do think we should ask. And you know, I think we should ask in the same condescending, fuck-all-you-peasants know-it-all bullshit fuck-ass tone that we use when requesting that the rest of the nation's needy prove their legitimacy to us. I think we should ask with the same nasty assumptions at the back of our throats, the same willingness to believe that somebody else is running a scam on us to get a fat government check, the same nasty, mean, small little pinchingness we use toward individual human beings. I think we should ask those questions.

I mean, for all we know, maybe Bear Stearns has a big ol' diamond cross they could sell, to pay their own damn way.

Bear Stearns Collapse: Who Gets Screwed? (Besides the Taxpayers) The Employees

I just heard on CNBC that Bear Stearns' 14,000 employees owned 1/3 of its stock. Probably part of their 401(k) and pension plans.

Bear Stearns stock was worth $159.36 per share on April 25, 2007.

Today it's worth less than $2 per share.

Atrios estimates that this is an average loss of $375,000 per employee.

Fed Shoveling Our Money To Thieving Banks

And you thought it was bad on Friday when the Fed gave Bear Stearns $200,000,000 of our money. Today -- a Sunday! -- they gave J.P. Morgan $30 billion, yes, $30,000,000,000 of our money to subsidize a deal to take over Bear Stearns. Public money for a private buyout. To protect the shareholders. You know the Bushies's aren't going to go back and, I don't know, bankrupt the morons who drove the company into bankruptcy. That might interrupt their time at the country club, or at the bridge tables:

Last year, when he was still chief executive of Bear Stearns Cos., James Cayne took heat for hitting the bridge circuit during troubled times for his firm. Will the same rules apply to Cayne now that he’s chairman?

We’ll soon find out. Thursday and today, as Bear fought off a pending cash crisis that threatened to ruin its business, Mr. Cayne – who relinquished his CEO title in January and become the firm’s non-executive chairman – has been in Detroit, playing in the North American Bridge Championship.

So far, he’s faring better than his firm. In the “Imp Pairs” event Thursday, Mr. Cayne and a partner placed fourth out of 130, according to figures from the American Contract Bridge League web site. (Bear shares fell 7%.) The playing took place between about 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. in the afternoon and 7:30 to 11 p.m. in the evening, say insiders – a period in which Bear CEO Alan Schwartz convened a series of conference calls with directors, according to people familiar with the matter, to discuss a pending cash pledge from J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and the Federal Reserve Board. Still, Mr. Cayne participated in at least some of the dialogue, said one of these people.

Brings to mind Nero fiddling while Rome burns, doesn't it?

Times (uk): Bear Stearns sold to JPMorgan Chase under Federal Bank pressure

America's Federal Reserve last night orchestrated a rescue takeover of Bear Stearns, the stricken Wall Street investment bank, by JP Morgan Chase in an unprecedented move to prevent the implosion of the US financial system.

In New York last night, JP Morgan Chase announced that it is to buy Bear Stearns for $240 million in shares - representing 6 per cent of the struggling bank's closing market value on Friday, and just 1 per cent of the group's capitalisation at the beginning of the month.

As part of the deal, America's central bank has effectively underwritten $30 billion worth of Bear's toxic sub-prime mortgage-backed bonds, to protect JP Morgan Chase shareholders. It is also providing special financing to JP Morgan Chase - of an undisclosed sum. Terms of the deal are unknown, and it is not clear whether such special financing is to cover the cost of JP Morgan's emergency loan to Bear made late on Thursday night.

Greg Palast says this is why the feds really jumped all over Eliot Spitzer's bones last week. Spitzer opposed giving the robber barons free reign to bankrupt homeowners while they make billions. So he had to go:

While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an ‘escort’ $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush’s new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators.

Both acts were wanton, wicked and lewd. But there’s a BIG difference. The Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush’s man Bernanke was using ours.

This week, Bernanke’s Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks’ mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.

[]

When the housing bubble burst and the paint flaked off, investors were left with the poop and the bankers were left with bonuses. Countrywide’s top man, Angelo Mozilo, will ‘earn’ a $77 million buy-out bonus this year on top of the $656 million - over half a billion dollars – he pulled in from 1998 through 2007.

[]

But there were rumblings that the party would soon be over. Angry regulators, burned investors and the weight of millions of homes about to be boarded up were causing the sharks to sink. Countrywide’s stock was down 50%, and Citigroup was off 38%, not pleasing to the Gulf sheiks who now control its biggest share blocks.

Then, on Wednesday of this week, the unthinkable happened. Carlyle Capital went bankrupt. Who? That’s Carlyle as in Carlyle Group. James Baker, Senior Counsel. Notable partners, former and past: George Bush, the Bin Laden family and more dictators, potentates, pirates and presidents than you can count.

The Fed had to act. Bernanke opened the vault and dumped $200 billion on the poor little suffering bankers. They got the public treasure – and got to keep the Grinning’s house. There was no ‘quid’ of a foreclosure moratorium for the ‘pro quo’ of public bailout. Not one family was saved – but not one banker was left behind.

Every mortgage sharking operation shot up in value. Mozilo’s Countrywide stock rose 17% in one day. The Citi sheiks saw their company’s stock rise $10 billion in an afternoon.

And that very same day the bail-out was decided – what a coinkydink! – the man called, ‘The Sheriff of Wall Street’ was cuffed. Spitzer was silenced.