Word: banking
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...question, one of the most dramatic episodes in American financial history. A famously scrappy Wall Street investment bank, Bear Stearns, went from seemingly healthy to dead meat in about five days. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, desperate to avoid a sudden collapse that might cause a full-fledged market panic, invoked a little-known 1930s legal provision to engineer a Sunday fire sale of Bear Stearns to banking giant JPMorgan Chase for a mere $2 a share. (Bear's stock price was $57 a week before, $171.51 in early...
...half the firm's employees slated to lose their jobs and no golden parachutes offered to the top executives, it wasn't a bailout. But it did take a $30 billion loan from the Fed to seal the deal. This was a truly extraordinary use of the central bank's powers and an indication that the subprime-mortgage crisis that erupted last summer has evolved into something bigger and more ominous--possibly the greatest challenge to the American way of financial capitalism since the Depression...
...profit in 2007. As late as the first week of March this year, there was no reason to think it was in imminent danger. Then rumors began flying that it was. Lenders refused to lend, clients refused to trade, and suddenly Bear was out of money. It was a bank run, more or less. And the scary thing was that there is no entirely satisfactory explanation for why it hit Bear. One may emerge as JPMorgan Chase's bean counters dig through the books, and some have fingered rumor-mongering short sellers who stood to gain as the stock dropped...
...greatest power of the fed is that it can create dollars at will. It gets those dollars into the economy by buying Treasury securities on the open market. When you hear the Fed is cutting rates, that usually means it's ordering the traders at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to start buying, and that drives short-term Treasury rates down...
...Administration to insure new loans for home owners facing foreclosure. But Congress could decide to take over and clean up every troubled financial institution in the land if things got bad enough. That would cost trillions, though, and still won't mean much if it's, say, a Swiss bank in big trouble...