Eddie Lampert lost about $475 million yesterday when shares of his Sears Holdings fell $7.24 to close at $97.48 (now at $96.61), after Bank of America temporarily closed a billion dollar line of credit. Lampert, a close personal friend of DealBreaker, told us that he’s not too worried about the drop, and shareholders shouldn’t be either. To prove his point, Big E sent out a quick letter to the interested parties last night. Find it after the jump.

April 21, 2008

To Our Shareholders:

Hey everyone, Coach E here. You might’ve noticed a negligible drop in our stock price yesterday. I’d like to head off any fears you might have about losing money by saying, rest assured, nothing is fucked. A few months ago, I equated Sears Holdings with perma-loser Eli Manning. Like Manning, after years of being told “you suck,” particularly on account of our involvement with Kmart, we turned things around and showed all of them, even my father, who never believed in me. Now, however, I’d like to amend the analogy slightly. We’re not Eli Manning. We are Ben Roethlisberger.

I may have jumped the gun back in February when I likened our success to winning the Super Bowl, but I was just so damned excited about Kmart not being the unprofitable pile of roadkill it was when we first got involved that I got ahead of myself. In reality, I should’ve put the strides we made on par with winning one pre-season game. But, whatevs, I didn’t. It’s fine though, it still works. Okay, so when I said we’d won the Super Bowl, we won it as Roethlisberger. This makes more sense coupled with yesterday’s losses, on account of the fact that Big Ben’s fucked up plenty since the big win of ’05, and Eli, not so much. So, moving forward (and backward), we, Sears, are Roethlisberger. Roethlisberger. Roethlisberger. Roethlisberger. Ben’s February ’05 = our February ‘08. Things were looking pretty good. Super Bowl champs-good, as a wise man once put it. Then we got hit by an old lady in her car (I guess that could be Bank of America? Not sure) while on our motorcycle in the off season and almost died from massive head trauma (these are our losses. That works, I think. I’m not so good with sports metaphors, so you tell me), and had to have our jaw/face/head completely reconstructed (those will stand for my forthcoming piss-poor attempts to fix things), and go on to have a fantastically shitty season (I’m anticipating more losses, again DO NOT WORRY), etc, etc, etc. But then, we’ll have a great year after all that. Which is what you (we, us, SHLD) have to look forward to.

Please don't kidnap me,
Ed

Earlier: Sears Holdings Chair Sees A Lot Of Sears In Previous Perma-Loser Eli Manning

Lampert Takes A Beating [NYP]