Vanity Fair is running a lengthy piece on the events leading to the collapse of Bear Sterns. It’s worth reading:

Bringing Down Bear Stearns: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com

On Monday, March 10, the rumor started: Bear Stearns was having liquidity problems. In fact, the maverick investment bank had around $18 billion in cash reserves. But soon the speculation created its own reality, and the race was on to keep Bear’s crisis from ravaging Wall Street. With the blow-by-blow from insiders, Bryan Burrough follows the players—Bear’s stunned executives, trigger-happy reporters at CNBC, a nervous Fed, a shadowy group of short-sellers—in what some believe was the greatest financial scandal in history.

[via Paul Kedrosky]