Bear Stearns

It's amazing to think that the fifth largest investment bank in the US could basically disappear in a day, or, perhaps more charitably, a week.  Dealbreaker thinks it's because they block blogs.  Here's Dealbook on potential buyers.  What are you supposed to do if a regulator?  The Fed brokers bailouts, while the SEC goes to those meetings.  UPDATE: Here's the Division on Trading and Markets with a slightly less cursory account of what the SEC did.  It still didn't do much.)  Two observations:

• It's interesting that while what BSC does is create and trade securities, it is the banking regulators who ride to the rescue, not the SEC.  So it has always been.  Should SEC officials get more of a look in?  I'm surprised to say that I've never heard the agency make that case for an expansion of regulatory turf, but perhaps Conglomerate's readers can remind me otherwise.
• BSC's claim that "we were fundamentally sound on Monday, we just got pounded by everyone else all week," is very Long Term Capital Management, no?