$85 --> $1

If you were a long-time, successful Bear Stearns employee last year, times might have been pretty good. Chances are that you had accumulated several tens or hundreds of million dollars in stock. If you were clever enough to sell your stock back then, you might be even happier right now. If you hung on to the bitter end though, you got $2 for each of those shares that was worth $170 last year. Still, the firesale to J P Morgan was better than nothing, I suppose.

How likely is this scenario to repeat? I don't know, but there are a heck of a lot of nervous bankers out there, staring up river and down, seeing black swans everywhere.

I just hope everybody remembers that George Bush and Alan Greenspan made this cake and that the Republican congress baked it.

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