It's Wall Street, Without the Cash

"Have you figured out what's next for you?" Noujaim asks a woman he greets on the elevator with a pat on the back.

"Well, I've got a few options," she replies. She mentions two of those options, but before she can get to the third, the doors open and Noujaim is on his way.

"Good luck," he says.

The fixed-income trading floor has row after row of computers and black chairs, an indoor prairie that looks two acres in size. At full bustle, rooms like this convey the blood lust that is capitalism at its most carnivorous, and when Bear was alive and well, Noujaim says, you'd have to shout to make yourself heard in here. The ceiling tiles were designed to reduce noise. Now, most of the seats are empty. In the few that are filled, traders are reading newspapers, or idly chatting on the phone while a Microsoft logo floats around their sleeping monitors.

"This is deathly quiet," Noujaim says. "When this place was functioning, it was a battleground."

The proximate cause of Bear's passing was a good old-fashioned run on the bank. Hedge-fund investors, spooked by rumors that the company's balance sheets were awash in toxic subprime mortgage securities, drained it of so much cash that it went bust. Seventeen billion dollars flew out the door in two days in March. The asset transfer system, which wasn't designed for an exodus of greenbacks on this scale, froze for a while. Fund managers were said to be showing up in the lobby, demanding their money.

In a sense, Bear was gossiped to death. And the company fought back with what several employees consider a mediocre crisis PR operation, one that was complicated by a bit of bad luck. When Bear CEO Alan Schwartz was interviewed a few days into the meltdown, on March 12, his no-problems-here refrain was interrupted in mid-sentence.

"I'm sorry to jump in here," said CNBC anchor Erin Burnett, who suddenly appeared on the screen. "Breaking news, though, we do want you to know that we have New York state officials confirming that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer will resign today."

Schwartz's attempt at pushback was too little and it might have been too late, since the momentum against Bear was nearly tsunami strength by then and wiped out the company a mere five days later. The day of Schwartz's CNBC appearance was also the day Bear employees started to panic. Especially after a senior managing director stood on a desk and announced to a group of underlings that everything was fine.

"He was so adamant," says an employee, "that we all realized, 'Oh my God, we're not fine.' "

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Everyone at Bear has contracted a mild case of sudden infamy. The company has come to embody the excesses blamed for what is all but officially a national recession, and it achieved something close to villainy after the Federal Reserve Board promised $30 billion to backstop the sale to JP Morgan. Protesters showed up in Bear's lobby, chanting "Help Main Street, not Wall Street." Schwartz was summoned to Congress, where he was gently barbecued. John McCain denounced "very greedy people" on Wall Street in a meeting with reporters and singled out Chairman Jimmy Cayne, "who decided the day before he was bailed out by the federal government to cash in millions of dollars worth of stock."