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Posted
Mar 24 2008, 10:48 AM
by
Matt Koppenheffer
Rating:
After the shocking announcement last week that JPMorgan was buying beaten-down Bears Stearns for $2 per share, the bank conceded on Monday to raise the buyout price to $10 per share. Call it the spirit of Easter, or just that warm feeling from the beginning of spring, but the amended offer strikes me an awful lot like a gift from JPMorgan.
Not everybody agrees with me though. Right now the field is split between those that think that Bear is worth substantially more than the original $2 deal, and those that think that the original $2 was a gift itself. For Bear Stearns' shareholders, the $10 per share is probably cold comfort anyway -- the price represents a 66% cut from the stock's price the Friday before the original $2 deal was announced, and a nearly 95% drop from its peak price of around $170.
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Posted
Mar 20 2008, 12:09 AM
by
Jon Markman
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The big question on investors’ minds this week is whether the market has reached a major bottom following the Federal Reserve’s sensational attempt to rescue troubled brokerage Bear Stearns and slash short-term interest rates. It sure looked that way to many Tuesday after the big stock indexes soared by 4%. But Wednesday not so much, as stocks forfeited three-quarters of their gains.
So here’s the plain facts: You can only get a major bottom in stocks if the impulse to sell has been exhausted and if investors respond to lower prices with a powerful, sustained wave of buying. And the actions this week suggest that neither has occurred. Selling was clearly not exhausted Tuesday because sellers came roaring back Wednesday.
(Update: The market's gain on Thursday shows investors are hope the worst is over. But it hardly proves that stocks are cheap enough.)
The verdict is therefore clear: A major bottom in the market hasn't yet arrived. To understand why, consider what got folks excited Tuesday. The bailout of Bear Stearns might seem positive on the surface but it loses its allure when you stop and ponder the implications of the fact that the fifth-largest brokerage in the nation lost 95% of its value in a few weeks' time. And the three-quarter point cut in interest rates means the Fed believes the economy is in terrible shape. As if to put an exclamation point on this issue, on Wednesday Merrill Lynch, UBS and Lehman Brothers, all of whom had business models with similarities to Bear Stearns, were on the hot seat -- sinking in value by up to 11.5% and closing at lows. Investors thus collectively decided more shoes will drop, and the Fed cannot bail them all out at once.
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Posted
Mar 19 2008, 12:07 AM
by
Matt Koppenheffer
Rating:
If Bear Stearns got a bailout this week, then it's sure news to the company's shareholders. The price that JPMorgan is expected to pay is around 1% of the company's value last year and in the range of 5% of what it was fetching on Friday when the original plan was announced for JPMorgan to loan Fed money to Bear.
So who did get bailed out here? On the top of my list are Bear's creditors. At the end of Bear's most recent fiscal year it had $11.6 billion in unsecured short term debt and another $68.5 of longer term debt on its books -- and that's not to mention the hundreds of billions of other liabilities that the company had. If the super-duo of JPMorgan and the Fed hadn't swooped in those creditors are likely working with bankruptcy courts to sort out what they could recover.
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Posted
Mar 17 2008, 11:00 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
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Billionaire Joe Lewis invested in Bear Stearns, buying as much as 10% of the brokerage firm.
Now, he may be out over $1 billion. On Sunday, the Times wrote that Lewis has lost about $800 million on his investment. That was before Bear Stearns accepted a $2 per share offer from JP Morgan.
Lewis's holding company Tavistock Group owns the Isleworth golf course in Windermere, Florida, and has stakes in companies including sporting-goods maker Puma AG, luxury-car maker Bristol Cars Ltd. and Ambrx Inc., a genetics-engineering firm. Tavistock is also developing real estate in Orlando, Florida, and the Bahamas, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
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Posted
Mar 16 2008, 07:37 PM
by
Charley Blaine
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The proposed sale of Bear Stearns on Sunday to JPMorgan Chase for $2 a share, or $236 million, will keep litigation lawyers busy for years as enraged shareholders seek to recover anything from the disaster.
The losses from Bear Stearns' demise are shocking, so shocking that Asian and Australian stocks tumbled on the news. The dollar was fallling. Crude oil jumped over $111 a barrel, and European shares were expected to open lower as was the U.S. stock market.
From a peak price of $171.52 in January 2007, Bear Stearns managed to lose 98.8% of its peak market value of $20.2 billion in less than 15 months, all because the company bet everything that the housing market and the markets for securities backed by subprime mortgages wouldn't break. It did
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Posted
Jan 10 2008, 01:18 AM
by
Matt Koppenheffer
Rating:
The turbulence at the top on Wall Street continues. Bear Stearns will be sporting a new CEO now that Jimmy Cayne has announced that he is stepping down from the position. Cayne is now the third major Wall Street firm with a new chief, following the shake-ups at Merrill Lynch and Citigroup.
It doesn't come as all that much of a surprise that Bear would make a change -- along with Merrill and Citi, the firm and its stock have been among the worst hit by the recent market turbulence. Unlike some of its other competitors, though, underperformance at Bear wasn't as localized to the debt markets, suggesting that there may be some bigger underlying problems
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Posted
Oct 12 2007, 11:30 AM
by
Matt Koppenheffer
Rating:
Sometimes, when things aren't going your way, you need to celebrate the little things. You know what I mean -- when you were little and having a bad week and your mom would put one of your pictures on the refrigerator. You knew the picture was lousy, but the gesture made you feel better anyway.
It looks like Bear Stearns needed a little of the same. The firm recently proclaimed that it was "[ranked] in Alpha's inaugural top equity trading firms survey." Now doesn't that sound nice?
Well, it does, until you actually look at the survey. Alpha talked to 300 hedge funds about the firms they work with for equity trading. True to their word, Bear Stearns did, in fact, make the list. In the overall rankings, though, the firm managed a pretty mediocre number five placing out of 10 firms included
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