Bear Stearns...the next episode

JP Morgan's CEO hotspur Jaime Diamon managed to salvage his bid for the failed investment bank Bear Stearns by upping his bid by 5 for us$10 a Bear share of stock. He now holds 39,5 per cent and is shy of a majority to take the company over. The new offer means he takes on for his bank a cool us$1 billion in debt, but that is nothing compared to what he gets by absorbing Bear. JPMorgen Chase will inherit a seasoned assetment management and trading department, for example, which it sorely needed. Discontent among the Bear employees will dissipate with a good, healthy, fat pay cheque. Yet Diamon has a fight on his hands by some major stockholders who don't relish the thought of being taken to the cleaners.
The new offer pumped the Dow Jones Average up along with good news on the mortgage front. But it's a bleep, not a turning of an economic meltdown corner. The markets are sensitive to the least sneeze or bad news, and like all ups in the makets, they are followed by steep declines.
No matter any which way you slice the deal, Jaime Diamon will walk away with the reputation of a rogue prince in the cut of Bear's James Cayne and Ace Goodman, slick, rough and tumble, no nonsense CEO's with hard hearts.
The toiletroom attendent Bernanke and the anal hair stylist Hank Paulson got the shock of their lives when they thought they had tamed the markets by 'rescuing' Bear Stearns; they woke to the news that they had set dominos falling in world markets, and they ran faster on the treadmill of tied laissez capitalist solutions to save the banks, the assurers, Bears' creditors by cutting interest rates, becoming the lender of last resorts to greedy bankers in the mould of Hank Paulson. They've no vision beyond the tip of pointy noses and small minded greed. In no way, shape, or form, have they whipped the recession and the fragile market. They're not the men to turn the mess around but only the cleaners of an Augean stable they do not know where to begin to clean.