bought at 24.5, page-71

Ha ha joelbaby and macka...

The banks haven't rolled over the loans because they want to extract a premium - simple as that. Liquidation will cause them huge capital losses. A shallow recession will not make a major impact on non-discretionary spending so the point is moot.

Deleveraging has NOTHING to do with it and shows your complete confusion between the markets. Bear Steans gross leverage ratio was 33:1.

Equally macka your lack of understanding of point 2) explains why you don't understand the real situation. Lack of borrowing source means there's a lack of comparable sales which in turn means thet there is no proof that the assets are overvalued and in any case conservative write downs have already been factored in.

Joelbaby if you want to accuse people of being deluded pick another target. I could debate rings around you. Or have you forgotten your 1:6 debt ratio faux pas?

Your over the top doom and gloom reminds me of the pre year 2000 hysteria. I was the lead software architect for a major asia pacific finance company at the time. We had external companies pitching solutions to the Y2K bug to us for prices ranging from $1.5 to $7.5. I pitched the idea of automating the process by writing software that rewrote our source code automatically. My team did it in three weeks at a total cost of $275K. Noone at the time believed it would work. I secured my next three years salary at $250K/yr based on that one job alone.