![]() Bear’s swashbuckling C.E.O., 74-year-old Jimmy Cayne, pilloried as a detached figure who played bridge and rounds of golf while his firm was in crisis, had been ousted in January. At the time, rumors flew it would go bankrupt. The nation’s fifth-largest investment bank, known for its notoriously freewheeling-some would say maverick-culture, Bear had pledged to fork over more than $3 billion the previous summer to bail out one of its two hedge funds that had bet heavily on subprime loans. Molinaro, 50, Bear’s popular chief financial officer, thought he could spot the first rays of daylight at the end of nine solid months of nonstop crisis. Still, as he drove in from his Connecticut home to the glass-sheathed Midtown Manhattan headquarters of Bear Stearns, Sam Molinaro wasn’t expecting trouble. ![]() In what the economists called a “credit crisis,” the big banks were so spooked they had all but stopped lending money, a trend which, if it continued, would spell disaster on 21st-century Wall Street, where trading firms routinely borrow as much as 50 times the cash in their accounts to trade complex financial instruments such as derivatives. The mortgage market had crashed major companies like Citigroup and Merrill Lynch had written off billions of dollars in bad loans. ![]() On Monday, March 10, Wall Street was tense, as it had been for months.
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