Those Kingly Tools At Bear Stearns

If this seems a little phallic, it didn't start out that way.  In fact, I had been thinking more about headdress.

Specifically though, I was just so impressed by the way Bear Stearns and its kingly top honchos have made such a big deal about their towering skyscraper in almost every Annual Report since 2000, the year it was erected.  (It's been on the cover of all but two Reports since and there are easily another dozen shots I haven't included.)

How prophetic.  I mean, the company that almost singularly identified itself by its huge piece of real estate ends up leading the market meltdown, and then crashing and burning due to rampant speculation in hedge funds tied to sub-prime mortgages.

And you wonder why a bin Laden would have been so focused on the World Trade Center.

Oh, and here's one more view of the Bear Stearn boys and their steel fixation.

Bear Stearns Annual Reports (investor relations)
As Big Banks Fall: The Bear Has Fallen and the Bull is Gone (Danny Schechter - Huffington Post)
Bear Stearns fiasco is regulatory failure (Baltimore Sun)

(images: Bear Stearns Annual Reports, 2000 - 2005)

Comments

[jrmas]

Steve Bell in today's Guardian also focusses on the building.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoons/stevebell/0,,2266294,00.html

[black dog barking]

If only they'd have invested in financial instruments as well as they did in symbols. Conflating financial engineering with the civil and mechanical practices, giving numbers in computers the same weight and power as steel and concrete resting on bedrock, that is pure marketing genius. (In the "You wish it were true" sense of genius.)

More public relations engineering: after selling the idea that Bear Stearns financial products are as strong as skyscrapers, sell the men that manage those products as human skyscrapers. Giants among men, towering above us.

Perhaps the end game of all this puffery is a desire by all on the inside to stake a claim to the ultimate safety net — We Are Too Big To Fail.

[tekel]

two thoughts.

1: In the last two days, I've seen the BSC skyscraper valued at between $500 million and 1.5 billion. That means JP Morgan's $246 million purchase of Bear, which includes the building itself, values the company inside the building at not more than NEGATIVE $250 million.

2: For a sense of scale, (maybe a bar graph?) the $246 million is approximately equal to the combined annual compensation of the top four guys at Goldman.

[Zak44]

My "Edifice Complex" theory of investing is that when a corporation's focus turns to the construction of pharaonic monuments to itself, it has stopped thinking about the future in favor of memorializing the past.

And that's when you sell the stock.