Jeff Faux on Bear Stearns and the financial crisis:
“We all fucked up,” says Alan Schwartz in the final paragraph of House of Cards. “Government. Rating agencies. Wall Street. Commercial Banks. Regulators. Investors. Everybody.”
Schwartz was the last chief executive officer of Bear Stearns, which, when it collapsed in March 2008, became the first of the financial-market dominos that ultimately toppled the U.S. and world economies. His generous sharing of culpability is a bit like the sly confession of the serial murderer who implicates his parents, his teachers, and the police for their failure to keep him from killing. Still, he has a point; there are multiple fingerprints at the scene of this crime.
