IS YOUR BANK AS FRIENDLY

J.P. Morgan Buys Bear in Fire Sale … As Fed Widens Credit to Avert Crisis … Ailing Firm Sold …For Just $2 a Share …In U.S.-Backed Deal…The Wall Street Journal … By ROBIN SIDEL, DENNIS K. BERMAN, and KATE KELLY…March 17, 2008; Page A1
Pushed to the brink of collapse by the mortgage crisis, Bear Stearns Cos. agreed -- after prodding by the federal government -- to be sold to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. for the fire-sale price of $2 a share in stock, or about $236 million.
Bear Stearns had a stock-market value of about $3.5 billion as of Friday -- and was worth $20 billion in January 2007. But the crisis of confidence that swept the firm and fueled a customer exodus in recent days left Bear Stearns with a horrible choice: sell the firm -- at any price -- to a big bank willing to assume its trading obligations or file for bankruptcy.
To help facilitate the deal, the Federal Reserve is taking the extraordinary step of providing as much as $30 billion in financing for Bear Stearns's less-liquid assets, such as mortgage securities that the firm has been unable to sell, in what is believed to be the largest Fed advance on record to a single company. Fed officials wouldn't describe the exact financing terms or assets involved. But if those assets decline in value, the Fed would bear any loss, not J.P. Morgan.
The sale of Bear Stearns and Sunday night's move by the Fed to offer loans to other securities dealers mark the latest historic turns in what has become the most pervasive financial crisis in a generation. The issue is no longer whether it will yield a recession -- that seems almost certain -- but whether the concerted efforts of Wall Street and Washington can head off a recession much deeper and more prolonged than the past two, relatively mild ones.


Surely if you or I found ourselves in a financial predicament similar to Bear Sterns, “we” too would find a friendly banker in “Uncle Sam”…?

A bank willing to forgive the errors in judgment resulting from our commitment to “greed”

A friendly face that willingly chooses to bail us out of the financial morass “we” solely inflicted upon ourselves…?

“We” too are in search of that bank which willfully passes legal obligations solely of our creation to others to be assumed and paid in full while we entertain other venues of financial self-enrichment.

If you are Corporate America, what is there not to like about the hubris of our “free-enterprise-capitalistic economic-system”..?

On the other hand, if you are one of the “little-people” stuck with picking up yet another tab, what’s there to like…?

Though this be our current reality, “we” can easily exercise the lawful power which resides in us and take a path which reflecting not greed but abundance. All it takes is belief in self and others.