WASHINGTON — James Cayne, who led Bear Stearns for 15 years, and his successor defended the conduct of the Wall Street firm against skepticism that uncontrollable outside forces were to blame for its demise two years ago.
The firm’s stunning collapse in March 2008 “was due to overwhelming market forces that Bear Stearns … could not resist,” Cayne testified today before the congressionally chartered Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
Members of the panel had said earlier that Bear Stearns’ mounting debt and reliance on rival banks for tens of billions in loans on a daily basis must have played a role.
The panel is investigating the roots of the crisis that plunged the country into the most severe recession since the 1930s and brought losses of jobs and homes for millions of Americans.
The hearing marked Cayne’s first public appearance in the aftermath of the financial crisis.
Cayne was Bear Stearns’ CEO until January 2008. Also appearing was Alan Schwartz, who succeeded Cayne for a few months.
“It does seem to me that there was an extraordinary level of risk taken” by Bear Stearns, panel chairman Phil Angelides told Cayne.
“That was the business. That was really industry practice,” Cayne responded, while acknowledging that in hindsight the mounting debt levels taken on by the bank were excessively high.
Cayne said “we made a conscious decision” to move to using special loans from other investment banks, known as repurchase agreements, because it provided a better way to obtain financing in the credit crunch that crippled the commercial paper market.
Those “repo” loans grew to $50 billion to $60 billion overnight in the period before Bear Stearns failed.
Bear Stearns was the first Wall Street bank to blow up. It was caught in the credit crunch in early 2008 and foreshadowed the cascading financial meltdown in the fall of that year. The Federal Reserve orchestrated Bear Stearns rescue buyout by JPMorgan Chase &Co. with a $29 billion federal backstop.
Bear Stearns was the smallest of the “Big Five” investment banks on Wall Street but was known for its go-against-the-grain scrappiness.
Cayne’s management style drew criticism. As two of Bear Stearns hedge funds were melting down in June 2007, Cayne reportedly managed to spend 10 of 21 workdays out of the office, taking a helicopter from Manhattan to New Jersey on Thursday afternoons for regular golf games and skipping work to play in bridge tournaments.
It was Schwartz who negotiated with the Fed for the sale of the bank to JPMorgan for $10 a share; Cayne had become non-executive board chairman in January and was playing in a bridge tournament in Detroit.
“The market’s loss of confidence, even though it was unjustified and irrational, became a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Cayne told the hearing.
“The efforts we made to strengthen the firm were reasonable and prudent, although in hindsight they proved inadequate,” Cayne said. “Considering the severity and unprecedented nature of the turmoil in the market, I do not believe there were any reasonable steps we could have taken, short of selling the firm, to prevent the collapse that ultimately occurred.”
Earlier, members of the bipartisan panel challenged other former Bear Stearns’ executives on what caused Bear Stearns to collapse.
The executives testified that they did all they could to keep Bear Stearns afloat before it fell victim to an unstoppable run on the bank. Its business strategy of borrowing funds from rival firms was sound under the crimped credit market conditions at the time, they said.
“In retrospect I don’t believe that there was anything that Bear Stearns could have done differently with respect to its funding model that would have prevent this run on the bank,” said Paul Friedman, who was the firm’s chief operating officer for fixed income.
Unfounded concerns by brokerage customers and rumors in the market about Bear Stearns’ solvency in the week of March 10, 2008 sparked the firm’s collapse, Friedman and other former executives testified.
Angelides pointed to Bear Stearns’ mounting reliance on the overnight repurchase loans.
“At the end of the day, it almost was the ultimate hand to mouth,” Angelides said.
When rival Wall Street firms canceled the agreements and brokerage customers pulled their assets out of Bear Stearns, the firm was pushed to the brink.
Bill Thomas, the panel’s vice chairman, said the firm was “so dependent on others for your daily bread. … You had no fallback to your fallback.” He said the firm’s business model relied on the trust rivals on Wall Street had in it in order to extend credit, he said.
“It appears the financial crisis was an ‘immaculate calamity’; no one was responsible,” said Angelides, a Democrat and former California state treasurer.
A former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Christopher Cox, is urging that Congress must act to close gaps in the regulatory system that helped caused the financial crisis. He said in prepared testimony that the SEC and the Federal Reserve tried to work together to fill the gaps in regulation of investment banks before the crisis struck in 2008.
The role of federal regulators also is key in the probe of the financial meltdown. Lawmakers and investor advocates have criticized the SEC’s oversight of Wall Street firms during and after the crisis.
The “Big Five” investment banks including Bear Stearns were in a voluntary program of supervision by the SEC established in March 2004. It was terminated in September 2008 by then-SEC chairman Cox, who said it clearly hadn’t worked.
“We were in pretty steady dialogue” with the SEC in the period when Bear Stearns came under stress, said Samuel Molinaro Jr., the former chief financial officer and chief operating officer. “They were comfortable with the actions we were taking and the way we were managing the situation.”
The inquiry panel, which has been holding a series of hearings, will hear testimony Thursday by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who headed the New York Fed at the time of the 2008 crisis and former Treasury chief Henry Paulson, the chief architect of the federal bailout.
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