Bear Stearns is gone, and now so is the portrait of fallen chief executive and company chairman Jimmy Cayne by Geoffrey Raymond, the artist who has painted Eiliot Spitzer, Jim Cramer (twice), Lloyd Blankfein and Dick Grasso. It was sold to the wife of a former Bear Stearns employee. She paid $12,000.

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Your company’s in trouble and you need to relax. You’ve tried taking every other day of the week off from work to play in golf and bridge tournaments, but that’s not doing the trick because, as it turns out, you’re almost as bad at those things as you are at not losing money, and you routinely turn in unimpressive scores on the green and sometimes place close to dead last at the card table. Skipping out on conference calls two minutes after they’ve started isn’t helping you to unwind (which is surprising, because you were leaving for your three hour deep tissue massage/nap combo, and those usually do the trick), and neither is playing dead. What’s a CEO to do? If you’re Jimmy Cayne, the answer is simple—get high. Get really, really high.
Yes, according to today’s Journal, James Cayne is a pothead, and may even be stoned right now (you would be, too, if you’d recently been outed in a Page One article for being friends with Maury Povich). It’s apparently common practice for Cayne to light up at the end of the day during bridge tournaments, and the old boy once hotboxed a men’s room at a Doubletree hotel in Memphis with “a woman.” He denies the story, though telling, so very tellingly, Cayne told Journal reporter Kate Kelly that he would only respond “to a specific allegation” and not general questions regarding the fact that he loves weed. That the very next thing he did was fish an empty Fresca can out of the recycling bin and ask Kelly if she had “anything sharp enough to poke a hole” is also suspect.
What else did we learn about Cayne today that we didn’t already know? He fancies himself more important than the leader of the free world, refusing to meet with the President about economic issues unless Bushie comes to 383 Madison Avenue (a visit GWB has yet to make, probably because he’s scared the temptations surrounding him in the office of a drug addict will be too much for him to handle). He’s dying to use the term “Mick” (in July, Cayne told mortgage-division head Tom Marano to “keep [his] Irish down”). And perhaps most telling, this: Cayne can no longer enjoy the singular bliss that is lighting up and enjoying a bowl of Count Chocula, because a few years ago, he was diagnosed with a breakfast-cereal allergy, an affliction which he spoke at length about on July 12. And this would probably explain why he has a tendency to act like an unmitigated prick, a trait illustrated by the fact that Cayne regularly schedules time not to work, per se, but to tell employees the various ways in which their children suck (once informing investment chief Alexandra Lebethal that her 11 year-old son had a “rotten handshake” and will be going “nowhere in life” and sending an email to Alan Schwartz that said, “I bet your kids are going to grow up to be just like me”).
Bear CEO’s Handling Of Crisis Raises Issues [WSJ]

We noted the other day that immediately after he fired Warren Spector, James Cayne shot a golf personal best, probably because stripping someone of his livelihood is a good way to tighten your wrist cock and improve the explosion through your hips. (I shot a 30 after firing Bressler). Today DealBook compares Bear Stearns’s closing stock price between June 14 and August 9 and Big Jim’s golf score. A 35 percent correlation between BSC’s price and Cayne’s score reveals that when Bear is down—which is most of the time—Cayne’s game is down, too, by which we mean up, because that’s how golf is tallied, and if you don’t know that, you shouldn’t be reading this site.
Now, by personal best, we mean 88, which is not good at all, unless it’s amateur hour. The Bear Stearns press office, staffed—out of necessity—by con artists, came up with an excuse that would no doubt please shareholders worried that he was spending too much time away from the office: “[Mr. Cayne] regularly plans an evening round after work on Thursdays and again on Fridays,” and the reluctant CEO: “Why, you think he should spend more time on the green?”
The Bear Stearns Golf Index [DealBook]

We’re in the middle of an GLOBAL FINANCIAL MELTDOWN! (Carney’s caps, emphasis, punctuation). Everyone’s panicking, running for their lives and spreading rumors. Many of the rumors aren’t true but enough of them have turned out to be close enough for horseshoes, hand-grenades and volatility traders.
The latest one is that Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne has either been fired or resigned. While some have already called for Cayne’s head after recent trouble of Bear Stears, and—if it one of those “we’re going to have to ask you to leave the bar, sir”-type situations—perhaps even a blessing in disguise for a guy who just wants to relax and play some golf in his last days on earth, we’re inclined to believe the old boy’s going to buried in the building. And, of course, that he remains as CEO.
Senior MD of Investor Relations, Elizabeth Ventura, told Dealbreaker, “These types of rumors are irresponsible and have no basis in fact.” And prior to being put through to Ms. Ventura, we were told by a Bear Stearns operator, “We haven’t heard anything on the switchboard.”

First he goes from being really bad at golf (for someone who leaves the office every day at noon to play, after coming in late) to just being bad at golf, and now we’ve learned that while there are many Bear shareholders voming over the side of the George Washington Bridge (we’re going out on a limb and assuming that most BS stockholders are from New Jersey), James Cayne isn’t one of them. Why? He doesn’t own that much of the company. Alan Greenberg, Sam Molinaro, Warren Spector, and James Cayne were among the few investors who took (a good amount of) their money and ran, just before the anvil of a stock crashed to $117.78 from $172 on high. Between the four Bear higher-ups (sorry: 3 Bear higher-ups and one guy who’s unemployed, coincidentally, the working title of my forthcoming sitcom on CBS), they cashed out in excess of $57 million in company stock before things got ugly. What the investors saved—nearly $16 million—in well-timed sales, they passed on to a bunch of sad sacks lacking luck, who one hopes didn’t also have their money in the “no value” or “little value” hedge funds.
Oh, and this guy wants him to be fired. So:

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