Kate Kelly's Bear piece, on the other hand, stepped it up in her second installment: Again, the general outlines of the affair were well known, but oh the details. There's Alan Schwartz, preparing for a conference with Walt Disney Co.'s Robert Iger in Florida, as the firm is buckling in New York. There's J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.'s Jamie Dimon, annoyed that someone is interrupting his 52nd birthday, then taking the call from Schwartz on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. And then there's a flash of Kelly's specialty: a Jimmy Cayne non-sighting. Cayne was at yet another bridge tournament, in Detroit, and managed to miss part of a key meeting of Bear senior executives. If only the WSJ had not illustrated the story with these silly, cartoon-like minigraphics.
Part two does raise certain questions, which may have to do with this kind of retrospective story. There seems to have been no debate inside Bear as to which agency to seek out for help: It was the Federal Reserve or bust. Neither the Securities and Exchange Commission nor Treasury seem to have a role here. No one calls the SEC's Christopher Cox and asks for help; there is no reporting about conversations with Treasury's Hank Paulson, which, if you think about it, is remarkable (obviously, there were conversations between Paulson and Bernanke, but still). Bear has Sullivan & Cromwell LLP's Rodgin Cohen call Timothy Geithner of the New York Fed, and suddenly there's a bunch of Fed guys hanging out in the library. Now again, Kelly may have missed some details, but the automatic assumption -- a precedent-setting assumption -- that only the Fed could help, is striking.
Indeed, the story is written almost as if there's a hidden determinism to shape the final outcome, which again, may have more to do with how Kelly tells her tale than the reality. But while we still have part three to go -- clearly, J.P. Morgan's big act -- it does powerfully suggest how quickly decisions were made based on scanty information. Unlike the Times' piece, which presents Bernanke as a doughty rational policymaker, the Fed was swept up in the onrush of events like everyone else. That's not to say Bernanke didn't make a tough decision, just that it wasn't made after intensive meditation and working through a pile of academic studies. Not only was Bear a black box, so too were the markets: The uber-justification for intervention -- that Bear's failure was the first of many dominos -- was a guess. And, once the die was cast, there's no turning back. A new age dawns, and Buddha-Ben is born.
Kelly's story also does not really get to why Bear was "chosen" to be sucked down the drain -- that's not a criticism, just an observation. Bear was not insolvent; it had liquid assets; it did not need to go down. But the anxiety-ridden markets seemed to reach a point in March where there was a sense that some firm would fail: And in that eerie process that markets have of determining reality, Bear got the black ball (Kelly has Rabobank in the Netherlands among the first to pull its lines, which is an interesting illustration as to how global the situation was and is). Bear had mortgages; it was smaller than the big firms; it had seen turmoil at the top. And everything it did to shore itself up only seemed to confirm it was failing. Was there massive shorting, even collusion? Who knows? But it doesn't make any particular difference to the ultimate outcome: The market as a whole lost confidence in Bear and swiftly destroyed it.
Is this fair? Could it have been avoided? Could it have been foreseen? Did Bear's past sins -- its snarly feistiness -- come back to haunt it? These are questions folks in Washington and in the punditocracy love to ponder. The answers probably are no no no no, but more importantly, beside the point. Boats go out to sea, and sometimes a giant wave crashes upon them. Wall Street firms live off the market, and sometimes -- with warnings that seem inevitable only in retrospect -- a vast convulsion sucks them down. Arguing orchestration, probing past sins, underestimates, humanizes, the vast, impersonal power of these markets, which is the first step toward inviting more destruction. - Robert Teitelman
Having no access to editorial judgments at The New York Times, one does wonder if the paper of record rushed 
