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Gerry Schwartz - Wikipedia

In the 1970s, Schwartz worked at Bear Stearns,[1] where he was mentored by Jerome Kohlberg, Jr., who later became a founding partner in Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.[2] Schwartz left Bear Stearns by 1977, returning to Canada.[2] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerry_Sch…

Along with Izzy Asper, Schwartz co-founded CanWest Global Communications in 1977. Kohlberg joined Bear Stearns in 1955 where he would go on to manage the corporate finance department.[6] Working for Bear Stearns in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kohlberg, alongside Bear

Stearns executives began advising a series of what they described as "bootstrap" investments. Bear Stearns was founded as an equity trading house on May 1, 1923 by Joseph Ainslie Bear, Robert B. Stearns and Harold C. Mayer with $500,000 in capital. Internal tensions quickly arose

among the three founders. The firm survived the Wall Street Crash of 1929 without laying off any employees and by 1933 opened its first branch office in Chicago. In 1955 the firm opened its first international office in Amsterdam.

After working some years in Europe, Stearns worked at the brokerage J.J. Danzig & Co. before founding Bear Stearns with partners Joseph Ainslie Bear and Harold C. Mayer in 1923. He became a member of the New York Curb Exchange, later the American Stock Exchange in 1929, and

would eventually be its chairman. Eventually, after renegotiating the purchase of Bear Stearns, Maiden Lane LLC was funded by a $29 billion first priority loan from FRBNY and a $1 billion subordinated loan from JPMorgan Chase, without further recourse to JPMorgan Chase.[24]

The structure of the transaction, with both loans collateralized by securitized home mortgages[25] and with the JPMorgan Chase loan bearing losses before the FRBNY loan, meant that FRBNY could not seize or otherwise encumber JPMorgan Chase's assets if the underlying

collateral became insufficient to repay the FRBNY loan.[25][26] Chairman of the Fed, Ben Bernanke, defended the bailout by stating that a bankruptcy of Bear Stearns would have affected the real economy and could have caused a "chaotic unwinding" of investments across the US

markets. While it was not clear if JPMorgan's lawyers, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, were to blame for the mistake in the hastily written contract, JPMorgan's CEO, Jamie Dimon, was described as being “apoplectic" about the mistake.[32] The Bear Stearns bailout was seen as an

extreme On September 12, Timothy F. Geithner, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, called a meeting on the future of Lehman, which included the possibility of an emergency liquidation of its assets.