It's the New York banking equivalent of the Enron meltdown: Bear Stearns has agreed to sell itself to JP Morgan Chase at a fire sale price. When Bear Stearns' 14,000 employees left work Friday afternoon, the bank's stock had already plunged almost 50% in value, closing at $30 a share. But today they found out something much, much, much worse: their company has been purchased for a piddling $2 a share. That's $236MM for a company that was "worth" $3.54 billion on Friday. That's a 93% discount on Friday's closing price, and a 99% discount off January 2007's price of $170/share. Given that Bear Stearns' midtown headquarters had been valued as high as $1.5 billion, the firm's liabilities must have been enormous. more ›