Reuters
Bond turmoil worse than Internet bubble: Bear CFO
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Bond market turmoil sending investors fleeing from risk may be a worse predicament than the 1980s stock market fall and Internet bubble burst, Bear Stearns Chief Financial Officer Sam Molinaro said on Friday.
“These times are pretty significant in the fixed income market,” Molinaro said on a conference call with analysts. “It’s as been as bad as I’ve seen it in 22 years. The fixed income market environment we’ve seen in the last eight weeks has been pretty extreme.”
“So, yes, we would make that comparison” to market events that also include the debt crisis of the late 1990s, he said.
Cramer did the ultimate rant today [VIDEO], screaming that Bernanke and Poole do not how bad it is “out there”.
Perhaps they do know, as Eric Falkenstein noted this morning: “Current Fed Chief Ben Bernanke did a lot of innovative work [Download PDF] in the 1980’s on credit cycles, noting that when finance companies like banks and insurance companies had shocks to their capital base, they reduced lending, and this cut off the companies that needed capital to propel the economy forward.”
They don’t call him “Helicopter Ben” for nothing.