Is Bear Stearns Just the Beginning?

March 17, 2008— -- With the collapse and then fire sale of Bear Stearns within the span of a few days, many on Wall Street are now looking around and asking, "Who might be next?"

Bear Stearns fell victim to what was essentially a bank run. Investors who feared that the 85-year-old firm was too deeply invested in bad mortgages cut off funding, crippling the firm.

Just a month ago, Bear's stock was trading at $80 a share. As news spread about the run on Friday, the bank's stock plunged, closing at $30 a share. And then — in what appears to be the final nail in the coffin — J. P. Morgan Chase announced plans over the weekend to buy the firm for a shockingly low $2 a share.

Bear was worth $20 billion in January and now — less than three months later — is being sold for less than $240 million.

So what about the other big Wall Street investment firms? Could we wake up tomorrow to suddenly find that another has become virtually worthless?

"It absolutely could happen to any one of these guys," said David Trone, a brokerage analyst at Fox Pitt Kelton. "There was a panic. If that degree of panic hit any of these guys, they're going down."

Trone said that while Bear Stearns showed some losses in the forth quarter of 2007 from the subprime mortgage market, it was doing a lot better during the start of this year.

"Bear was actually in a pretty good position," he said. "It was really no worse than other institutions that are standing today."

But starting on Thursday with a story in the Wall Street Journal, Trone said, new fears started to develop about Bear's access to cash and its ability to fund operations.

Fear set in, people started to sell as they erred on the side of caution and then "the self-fulfilling prophecy came true."

"A loss of confidence can't happen unless there is a grain of truth to the fundamental problem," Trone said. "The company had the flu, but it wasn't something it was supposed to die over. But the confidence broke."

This morning much of that speculation turned to Lehman Brothers, another well-known firm that is also heavily invested in subprime mortgages.