because they published a piece on the front page today about the Bear Stearns championship lacrosse team! The sport, if you don't know, is "popular in the New York area and at many prep schools and Ivy League colleges." I was relieved to read lacrosser and VP in credit sales Garssen Wong tell the reporter that despite Bear's troubles, "We're going to try to keep the legacy alive and defend our title." Terrific! Except I'm not sure that's the "legacy" most people are going to have in mind when they think of Bear Stearns from now on.

Bear Stearns: "We didn't learn a thing from the Enron fiasco, and we stupidly put ourselves in the same predicament".

He was probably right; They probably took a look at how much cash they had needed to meet any short term claims. They probably had enough cash to match a multiple deviation variation from historical norms. Unfortunately, people got scared and demanded far more of their money which far exceeded any historical norms. And the bank died.

When people got scared, they took their money out of Bear Stearns and the firm was left with owing a lot of money without any cash on hand to pay. Had nobody reported on Bear Stearns and the world remained ignorant of the situation, the bank might have survived. But almost any bank that has ever failed could make that claim. It's his own fault for keeping a profile of assets that was wildly inconsistent with his investors' and lenders' willingness to shoulder risks. You can't manage an investment bank on the presumption that the world will remain blind to your losses.

Enron, on the other hand, was just hiding realized losses from which it could never hope to recover (at least as I remember it). There was going to come a day when their checks would simply bounce because they actually lost all of their money and burned through their lines of credit, and this was entirely their own doing. Witch hunt or not, they were gone.

Bear's lines of credit simply dried up. Not that this excuses them, after all, banks are in the business of planning for exactly these contingencies.