Poof!

Wow. File this in things that I thought were wildly unlikely one week ago.

Bear Stearns, the 5th largest investment bank in the US has disappeared. JP Morgan Chase has agreed to buy them out for $2 per share in a deal that was brokered by the Fed. Wow. One year ago today the price was about $145.5 per share. That's such an insane drop in value it's hard to comprehend. That means Bear lost 98.6% of its value in a year. WOW.

I don't even know what this means for the economy but I'm thinking it's probably not good.

UPDATE to link to this which points out that Bear's Madison Ave. headquarters is worth around 1.2 billion. So buying Bear for 270 Million puts the value of Bear as a business at around negative one billion dollars.