“At Phi Kappa Wall Street, most of the frat boys are instantly recognizable. There’s the big, backslapping Irishman, Merrill Lynch, the humorless grind, Goldman Sachs, and the straitlaced rich kid, Morgan Stanley. And then, off in the corner, wearing its beat-up leather jacket and nursing a cigarette, was the tough-guy loner, scrawny Bear Stearns, who disdained secret handshakes and towel snapping in favor of an extended middle finger toward pretty much everyone.”
Vanity Fair drops an article by Bryan Burrough (who wrote the outstanding Barbarians at the Gate) about the startling end of Bear Stearns.
Much of the timeline and details of the story was already covered in the Wall Street Journal’s excellent three-part series, but I found this bit about the workings of CNBC to be a juicy little scoop:
From experience, he knew he faced a risk in picking the wrong CNBC correspondent for the interview. All the network’s talent—Gasparino, Maria Bartiromo, Faber, Larry Kudlow—had requested the interview, and whoever didn’t get it, Schwartz feared, might retaliate on the air. “Each of these correspondents has his own producer, and they all seem to hate each other,” one Bear executive told me. “If you choose Faber, you know Bartiromo will bash you the next day.” Schwartz directed Russell Sherman to identify the CNBC executive who supervised the correspondents, explain the situation, and ask that the correspondents who didn’t get the interview refrain from attacks. Sherman, however, couldn’t identify a single CNBC executive who seemed to have control over the correspondents. “Everyone on Wall Street knows the joke,” says another Bear executive involved in the discussions. “At CNBC, there is simply no adult supervision.”
How catty! I like it.
