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Stock Market Braces for Bear Stearns Sale Fallout
By
Jen Chung
Published Mar 17, 2008
Modified Mar 17, 2008
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By
Jen Chung
Published Mar 17, 2008
Modified Mar 17, 2008
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Photograph of newspaper distributor in London by Sang Tan/AP
This is going to be a tough morning on Wall Street. World financial markets fell and are falling after yesterday's news that JP Morgan had purchased Bear Stearns for $2 a share, a grand price of $236 million for a company valued at $3.54 billion on Friday. Tokyo's Nikkei 225 index fell 3.7%, and Hong Kong's Hang Seng fell 5.25%. Currnetly, London's FTSE 100 has fallen 2.2%, France's CAC 40 has fallen 2.5% and the German DAX has fallen 3.3%.
Further, the Federal Reserve made two moves to "bolster market liquidity and promote orderly market functioning." The first was to allow the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to "create a lending facility to improve the ability of primary dealers to provide financing to participants in securitization markets." The other was to decrease the rate on direct loans to banks 3.25% (from 3.5%). The Fed will also provide JP Morgan "up to $30 billion...to help it finance" its purchase of Bear Stearns.
The dollar is at "historic lows." Investment banks are among the stocks expected to be actively traded today. Lehman Brothers shares have dropped 25% in premarket trading--is it the next bank to fall?
Update 9:50 a.m. Stock market is down 127 points (about 1%). 84-year-old technical analyst Joseph Granville ("who joined E.F. Hutton in 1957" and publishes the Granville Market Letter in Kansas City, MO) told Bloomberg News, "We're in a crash, there's no other word to describe it. This is the worst I've seen and I've studied every bit of history all my life.''
And CNBC's Mark Haines just complained, "Did we not learn anything from Japan in the 1980s?"
Tagged
bear stearns
economy
federal reserve
jp morgan
stock market
wall street
world financial markets
Jen Chung
Jen Chung is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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