Sunday, March 16, 2008

~46 weeks and $22B+ lost...

WOW! By my screwy numbers Bear Stearns (BSC) traded at a 52 week high of $159.36 on 4/25/07. Roughly 46 weeks later Chase is buying it for $2/share?? How could that be? Didn't this thing trade at $30/share on Friday (3/14/08)? What about the shareholders? What about the employees? It is said that one-third of the company is employee (14153) owned. Someone tell me my math is bad here, PLEASE.

Date***#shrs****price***mkt cap
4/07***145M***$159***$23B
3/08***136M***$2*****$272M

Remember, they claim that a third of the company is employee owned? That means roughly ~$7.6B was lost in 46 weeks by the employees as a whole. Digging deeper, we see that, on average, over $500K was lost per employee! Can someone say, "DAMN!!!" And here is the sad part, folks are estimating that a lot of them will lose their jobs due to redundancies with Chase's existing businesses. If you still didn't get the hidden message let me spell it out for you:
DO NOT KEEP ALL YOUR EGGS IN ONE BASKET! YOU COULD LOSE YOUR JOB AND YOUR ENTIRE NEST EGG ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON!

1 comment:

G Hop said...

It would make a big difference if a previous loan from JPMorgan was paid back.