SArajevo School of science and technology Bear Stearns Collapse 2007 A short analysis ISMAR HOTA Table of Contents Introduction 3 Literature Review 3 Methodology 4 Analysis 5 Introduction 5 About Bear Stearns 6 The Culture at Bear Stearns 6 The Collapse of Bear Sterns 7 The Ethical Issues behind the Bear Stearns Collapse 8 What are subprime mortgages and its Ethical Failures? 8 The Lack of Corporate Governance at Bear Sterns 9 Moral Hazard at Bear Stearns 10 Non Ethical Conduct of the Regulators 11 Conclusion 11 Work Cited 13 Introduction This paper will presents the demise of Bear Stearns, the fifth biggest US investment bank at the time. It is broken down into two parts, analysis and conclusion. The analysis of this paper …show more content…
This matter is subject to a deeper analysis. It can be looked at from a number of perspectives including anthropological, cultural and psychological. The paper design is presented in a form of a case study which aims to present to the reader the case and has a goal to teach the reader with key issues which were responsible for the financial crisis of 2008 i.e., over landing subprime mortgages, speculations which led to inflated prices and eventually burst the housing bubble causing the banks to be stuck with large amounts of toxic worthless assets etc. The case study gives a concise explanation and the analysis of the ethical/unethical conduct at Bear Stearns which brought it to its demise. It uses this company example to present the key learning objectives to the reader. The strategy used this besides presenting the findings in the case study form also uses narrative research technique which gives an insight of the Bear Stearns’ culture and its business. This case study by no means gives the opinion of the author and solely bases its conclusions on the materials used to design the paper. Therefore, the conclusions are built upon deductive reasoning based on the information available about the financial markets and bout Bear Stearns. Analysis The analysis is going to briefly introduce Bear Stearns by presenting its business activities and its culture. It will then talk about the collapse of Bear Stearns and then
The responsibilities of the mortgage brokers to the borrowers, lenders, and investors were to promote the subprime mortgages to these groups of people in order for them to take out a loan. Although they did fulfill their responsibilities of promoting and having people sign up for it, they mishandled on how people should be granted for a mortgage loan. These brokers were to desperate about earning huge amount of money due to the expanding market that they ignored the proper precaution that they should have taken when they
The financial industry had gone to several crises through the decades. Around 2008, Alex Preston notice that the investments banking industry was in a crisis. Big banks were closing its doors or selling out to other companies. As it was the case of the National City Corp.; the first ever American’s mortgage maker had to close its doors after taking a large amount of proprietary risk. Other big financial companies like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, to avoid having to go down the same way, became bank holding companies, which means that these companies could receive emergency federal funds.
In The Divide, author Matt Taibbi portrays the effects of the Recession on the employees of the large bank firms that committed fraud. Taibbi discusses the life of Linda Almonte, a former executive for JPMorgan Chase. Originally, Linda worked for Washington Mutual, but a large amount of fraudulent activity happened at the bank firm and caused the bank to fail. They were giving loans to “anything that moved” (357) without looking at the consequences. However, the massive amounts of loan were not what “killed the company” (358), it was destroyed because of their inability to rid of their “defective product” (358). After Linda discovered that JPMorgan Chase was committing suspicious acts, she decided to investigate. Not only did she find
A Colossal Failure of Common Sense was one of many books to be published in the aftermath of the Financial Crisis of 2007. After seeing the global economy stall in the face of massive losses in word financial markets, many Americans sought to better understand the crisis and its causes. This book, written from the perspective of a financial market insider, provides a glimpse into the world of global finance and also seeks to explain how the players in this world were involved in the crisis. In the words of the author Lawrence McDonald, “My objective in writing A Colossal Failure of Common Sense was twofold. First, to provide … a close-up, inside view of how markets really work…..And, second, to give… as crystal clear an explanation as possible about the real reasons why the legendary Lehman Brothers met with such a swift end”1. By writing about his personal experience at Lehman Brothers and recounting stories from within the famous investment banking firm, Mr. McDonald largely succeeds at his first goal. However, the elements of personal biography and the chronological order of the book make it difficult for the reader to fully appreciate all of the varied causes of the financial crash. I believe that the main value of reading this book is in understanding these causes, with Lehman Brothers acting as a microcosm of the greater financial universe. As such, in this review I have isolated elements from Mr. McDonald’s book which highlight how the crisis
From 2004 the US Federal Reserve started increasing interest. In 2006, America’s real estate price started declining. This shook the foundation the SBS. In August 2007, America’s top 5 investment bank, Bear Stearns Co. declared to stop redemption on its
The move came after Bear Stearns was bleeding cash after word spread about the company’s crumbling position. European banks and other brokerage clients were pulling their investments and loans with Bear Stearns rapidly—and the company was losing billions in a week. In a swift move, the CEO of Bear Stearns, Alan Schwartz, was connected with the FED Chairman Ben Bernake, who agreed to loan money to JPMorgan if the financier company took over the quickly deteriorating Bear Stearns. It is argued that the FED was right in doing so as this move not save one of the largest American investment banks thus preventing a crushing blow to the US economy.
In financial institutions, ethical issues have been described as the bedrock of the reported financial scandals and funds mismanagement we have today and a special case is the 2010 recession also known as the Great recession. The great recession started in December 2007 and lasted till June 2009. It was characterized by massive job loss, increased poverty level, low investment rate, unemployment and so on (Lawrence et al., 2012). According to Argandona (2012), ethical issues that causes financial crisis occurs in two dimensions; personal ethics and organizational ethics.
In the wake of the recent financial crisis, many commentators attempted to analyze the roots of the conflict from a political or economic perspective. Anthropologist Karen Ho, a veteran of Wall Street as well as an academic, attempted to understand the reason that Wall Street behaves the way it does in her 2009 anthropological study of American finance entitled Liquidated: An ethnography of Wall Street from a cultural perspective. The central paradox with which Ho begins her book is: " the economy experienced not only record corporate profits and the longest rising stock market ever, but also record downsizings," further concentrating the wealth in America (Ho 2009: 1-2). But how can corporations grow richer as the American public as a whole grows poorer? Corporations no longer view themselves as responsible for taking care of their employees, creating good products, or serving their original mission. Instead, the focus is on generating shareholder wealth (Ho 2009:3). Shareholders, not the larger public, have become the symbolic and real focus of firm strategy. The shareholder "symbolized and 'stood in' for the whole of the corporation and became the sole locus of concern and analysis" during the time Ho conducted her study in the late 1990s and continues to this day (Ho 2009:175)
Additionally, when America’s economy was melting in 2008, the Federal Reserve played a big role to stabilize it. Besides the Great Depression during the years 1929 through 1939 the worst economic time for the United States, 2008 was unmistakable one of the worst years of America’s economy history. When this economic recession was taking place, the Fed had to take action to avoid another depression and to stop a fall from the financial system. With the help of the Federal Reserve J.P. Morgan Chase and Co.’s they planned to help Bear Stearns (an investment bank) with financial assistance to help the government to buyout AIG, a well-known insurance company. This helped to produce a strategy targeting to stabilize the credit market and also the short-term interest rate from 45% to almost 0 from the benchmark (Coste). Thanks to the Federal Reserve and their well design plan to avoid another recession they prevented the economy of the world or better known as Macroeconomic system from falling and getting it
In both texts, the protagonists have outside influences which affect how they use their power. In ‘Macbeth’ the eponymous character has his wife, who makes sacrifices in order for her husband to gain power. The reader can see that Lady Macbeth, while harsh and ruthless, in acting out of love; this becomes apparent in Act I (v) where Lady Macbeth calls upon supernatural forces to rid her of feminine weakness; “Come you spirits/ …unsex me here”. Again, Shakespeare makes reference to the supernatural; he wanted to warn audiences at the time that any conference with evil, supernatural “spirits” would result in the undoing of the order of nature and one’s demise. The word “unsex” suggests being stripped of all feminine weaknesses; the prefix “un-“ is widely repeated in the play.
Draw on the concepts you have studied in block 1, critically reflect on the ways in which your own life course has affected how you work in or use health and social care.
This chapter is about the background of 2007-2008 financial crisis. The 2007-2008 financial crisis has a huge impact on US banking system and how the banks operate and how they are regulated after the financial turmoil. This financial crisis started with difficulty of rolling over asset backed commercial papers in the summer of 2007 due to uncertainty on the liquidity of mortgage backed securities and questions about the soundness of banks and non-bank financial institutes when interest rate continued to go up at a faster pace since 2004. In March 2008 the second wave of liquidity loss occurred after US government decided to bailout Bear Stearns and some commercial banks, then other financial institutions took it as a warning of financial difficulty of their peers. In the meantime banks started hoarding cash and reserve instead of lending out to fellow banks and corporations. The third wave of credit crunch which eventually brought down US financial system and spread over the globe was Lehman Brother’s bankruptcy in August 2008. Many major commercial banks in US held structured products and commercial papers of Lehman Brother, as a result, they suffered a great loss as Lehman Brother went into insolvency. This panic of bank insolvency caused loss of liquidity in both commercial paper market and inter-bank market. Still banks were reluctant to turn to US government or Federal Reserve as this kind of action might indicate delicacy of
In 1994, Richard S. Fuld took control of Lehman Brothers as its Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Under Fuld’s aggressive leadership, the company flourished and became one of the largest investment banks in the United States. (Crossley-Holland 2009) reported that in 1994, each Lehman Brothers stock was averaging at $4 and by 2007 it catapulted to $82 creating a 20 fold increase. From 1994, Lehman Brothers gradually adopted an aggressive growth business strategy by expanding into highly complex and risky products such as Credit Default Swaps (CDS) and Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS). By 2007, Lehman Brothers was the biggest underwriter of mortgage-backed securities of the U.S. real estate market.
This work will examine the case 'Banking Industry Meltdown: The Ethical Financial Risk Derivatives" and determine which moral philosophy is most applicable to an understanding of the banking industry meltdown and explain the rationale. The case study will be analyzed and white-collar crimes considered as to whether they are different in any substantive manner from other more blue-collar crimes. This study will determine and discuss the role that corporate culture played in banking industry scenario and the response will be supported with specific examples. This work will postulate how leaders within the banking industry could have used their influence to avert the industry meltdown.