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With markets now closed for the day, you’d have to say the Fed’s frantic actions of the weekend–engineering the fire sale of Bear Stearns, cutting the discount rate and creating yet another “lending facility”–were successful. Stock markets didn’t collapse (Dow up slightly, S&P 500 and Nasdaq down), and, much more importantly, credit …

Bear Stearns’s share price went from $145 a year ago to $57 last week to $30 Friday to $3.82 this afternoon. That’s still $1.82 above the $2 a share JP Morgan Chase has offered to buy Bear (hope springs eternal, I guess), but it ain’t much. Now the FT’s Alphaville blog reports that “spurious” rumors are devastating the share price of …

See, I’m not the only one pushing the Swedish solution! From Merrill Lynch North American economist David Rosenberg’s Morning Call Notes today:

The Japanese credit crisis is usually cited as the benchmark for what not to do. But few cite Sweden’s crisis as a template on what might actually work. … the Swedish authorities realized early

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Today’s looking like the most fraught day yet in the rolling financial crisis of 07-08(-09?). Yeah, U.S. stock prices are up as of 10:50 a.m. But despite the continuing tendency of CNBC (and most of the rest of the financial media) to focus on the Dow and the S&P, they’re not what really matter here. This is a credit crisis, not a stock …

So JP Morgan Chase is buying Bear Stearns, for what everybody’s reporting to be somewhere in the $230-$250 million range.

That’s significantly less than Bear Stearns’ newish headquarters building at 383 Madison Ave.–a few blocks from JP Morgan Chase’s HQ–would fetch. Estimates Bloomberg:

The 1.2 million-square-foot, 45-story structure

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We’re back to Bear Stearns, where it all began. Last summer, it was the collapse of a couple of mortgage-security hedge funds run by the investment bank that sent credit markets into their first true tizzy. Now a Fed-backed temporary bailout of Bear means the 85-year-old firm may not survive much longer as an independent entity.

Bear …

I have two pieces in the new issue of Time with a “10 ideas that are changing the world” on the cover. One of them is one of those 10 ideas, really less an idea than an incipient trend, which I called “The New Austerity.” It begins:

Journalists and others with a tendency to see glasses as half empty have a long history of pronouncing the

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While the econoscribes of the U.S. (me included) were writing Thursday about what the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets had to say about the current financial crisis, a guy who may know more about dealing with financial disaster than anybody in Washington was giving a speech on “kriser i det finansiella systemet” to the …

I’ve been reading the 21-page Policy Statement on Financial Market Developments of the Hank-Paulson-led President’s Working Group on Financial Markets. It’s got a lot of acronyms in it. It’s also five years late and a few trillion dollars short, but that’s almost always the case with financial regulation. We’re very good at designing …

Commenter smedley and Swamplander Karen Tumulty have asked me to take a look at President Bush’s speech yesterday to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, especially his comments about tax cuts. Here they are:

I remember meeting with some right after the attacks and we were wondering whether or not our economy could withstand a

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Yesterday afternoon the news was that Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman got $5 billion in compensation last year. But now AP is running the following correction:

In an earlier version of this story, the Associated Press erroneously reported that Blackstone co-founder Stephen Schwarzman’s total compensation for 2007 was $5.13 billion.

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This 1981 beauty is part of a feature on the “Worst TIME Covers” on Time.com. But seriously, what do you think? Love ’em or hate ’em?

Update: An alert reader points out that one of the reporters on the cat cover story was, get this, Maureen Dowd.