Kate Kelly’s much anticipated book on the last 72 hours of Bear Stearns, Street Fighters, just arrived at the DBHQ and while there’s nary a whisper of our favorite anecdote from those last few days (wherein Bear executives called Jim Chanos Thursday night while he was out to dinner and asked the Kynikos founder/prime brokerage client if he could do them a favor and go on CNBC to vouch for the fact that things were all good in the hood*), it seems like it’ll be a good read when we get around to it. Having only skimmed the index so far, we’ve noticed that in addition to no mentions of Jesus, there are exactly zero name checks of SAC Capital, other than a passing reference to that Vanity Fair article** (which alleged Stevie-B and Ken Griffin “wanted [Bear] to go down, and go down hard,” and that after they supposedly spread the rumor that ultimately killed BSC they “celebrated Bear’s collapse at a breakfast that following Sunday and planned a similar assault on Lehman the next week.”) only to be shot down as unsubstantiated BS– as it relates SAC. But! Several pages are devoted to Citadel, both for its intent to score some of that hot Bear Stearns ass via acquisition and also for the rumors it was shorting the firm. This has surely caused outrage and cries of “Has the whole world gone mad? Does no one fear us? We could take down a venerable institution or house of hemp in two hours flat if we so chose to, believe you me,” up in Stamford, and envious glares in the general direction of Chicago. Which is apparently the only firm fund you don’t wanna fuck with. Unlike those lovable, huggable balls of love up North. They wouldn’t hurt a fly.
*Which Chanos wisely declined, despite what must’ve been hilarious promises that BSC would owe him “big time.”
** Our thoughts on which have been expressed here.
Kate Kelly is about 2-3 months too late with this, House of Cards already came out and covered this pretty extensively. A lot of her material seems like it was ripped off Cohan’s book, imho.
Pass.
@1- which was ripped from kate’s 3-part series that first appeared in the journal.
Actually if you read House of Cards Cohan talks about Kelly’s piece, and the inaccuracies in reporting. Also gets comments from Jimmy C and others from Bear on it as well.
They should make Street Fighters into a video game.
How many fucking times are we going to read that Jamie got called out from a greek b-day bash by Alan….
Jeeze do some real work and find out all the inept shit going down at the 5 th largest BD….
@5- where in this post is that anecdote mentioned?
Jimmy told me over a few grams of bio-skunk that he shorted bear himself and made a massive bundle – he using it to build a lair in a dead vulcano and to pay for hair implants for his pink cat to make it more fluffy
i shorted Bear
but i did not short the government
gnarly bob.
@3 not to mention getting the best Jimmy C quote EVER!
Wherein our protagonist calls the future treasury secretary a fairy…
What was that whole thing Dad used to tell me, “Beggars can’t be choosers…”
After losing our jobs, savings, retirement pensions and homes we must now face a thousand books to be published about everyone’s heroic efforts to save their own selves.
@7 FTW