Bear Stearns Secured Investors specimen bond certificate c1989 - mortgage-backed securities collapse

Desirable collectors piece. Plain certificate but incredible history of the collapse causing the Great Recession. Specimen (printers sample). Issued and cancelled. Circa 1989 from cancellation perforations. Measures approximately 12 x 8 inches.

The Bear Stearns Companies, Inc. was an American investment bank, securities trading, and brokerage firm that famously failed during the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession. After its closure, it was subsequently sold to JPMorgan Chase. The company's main business areas before its failure were capital markets, investment banking, wealth management, and global clearing services, and it was heavily involved in the subprime mortgage crisis.

Bear Stearns was founded as an equity trading house in 1923, by Joseph A. Bear, Robert B. Stearns, and Harold C. Mayer. 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 1985, Bear Stearns became a publicly traded company. It served corporations, institutions, governments, and individuals. The company's business included corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, institutional equities, fixed income sales & risk management, trading and research, private client services, derivatives, foreign exchange and futures sales and trading, asset management, and custody services.

Through Bear Stearns Securities Corp., it offered global clearing services to broker dealers, prime broker clients, and other professional traders, including securities lending. n 2005–2007, Bear Stearns was recognized as the "Most Admired" securities firm in Fortune's "America's Most Admired Companies" survey, and second overall in the securities firm section.

In the years leading up to the failure, Bear Stearns was heavily involved in securitization and issued large amounts of asset-backed securities which were, in the case of mortgages, pioneered by Lewis Ranieri, "the father of mortgage securities." As investor losses mounted in those markets in 2006 and 2007, the company increased its exposure, especially to the mortgage-backed assets that were central to the subprime mortgage crisis.

In March 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York provided an emergency loan to try to avert a collapse of the company. The company could not be saved, however, and was sold to JPMorgan Chase.

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