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Today's story stock is Bear Stearns, BSC. If you paid any attention at all to the stock market today, you've read at least some about Bear Stearns. Today Bear Stearns CFO Sam Molinaro had a conference call with analysts, and to say that the call was ugly is a major understatement. Molinaro said that the recent that the current condition in the fixed-income markets is the worst he has seen in 22 years. He also said that this fixed-income problem is worse than the dot com bubble from the late 90's and early 2000's. Anytime a CFO is out saying that the current time is worse than the dot com bubble, people are going to listen. 

If the conference call wasn't enough, Bear Stearns was also hurt by S&P cutting its outlook on the investment bank. Bear Stearns responded by saying the move by S&P was unwarranted and that this is an isolated incident. This doesn't sound like a small problem to me if it is the worst fixed-income market in 22 years.  

Bear Stearns was the poster child for the market drop today, and the stock has dropped 30% since the beginning of the year. All the investment banks went down with Bear today, and have done so for the past few weeks. It's hard to get a good read on exactly how damaging this problem will be for Bear Stearns and the other brokers. It sure seems to me like some of these investment banks will end up being a good buy sometime down the road since they are getting trashed now, but I'm certainly not going to stick my neck out on any of them yet.

The overall market had bigger problems than just the Bear Stearns headline today, but when Molinaro said this is worse for them than the dot com bubble, investors sold without asking questions.