Tag Archives: Banking

The collapse of Bear Stearns

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]

NetSuite looks to go public

This is interesting, and encouraging, news.  NetSuite – a company that started off as an online personal accounting company – is preparing for an initial public offering.  Michael Arrington has the scoop over at TechCrunch:

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » NetSuite’s Going Public, Looking for $1 Billion Valuation

NetSuite, the fraternal twin of SalesForce (both companies CEOs came out of Oracle and have similar business models), is preparing to go public next year based on 2006 revenues of about $70 million.

I remember NetSuite when it was NetLedger, a tiny (and boring) startup from the web 1.0 era that was funded by Larry Ellison himself.  Back in the day when ubiquitous connectivity was not a given, I had a beta NetLedger account to manage my personal expenses.  It was an interesting concept, but a bit of a leap of faith to put personal information online – not to mention trying to access the application on flaky internet connections.  The company eventually evolved out of the personal accounting business to build a rock solid all-in-one ERP-CRM application for small and medium sized businesses.

What’s encouraging here is that NetSuite is an ‘old guard’ web company, one that survived a bursting bubble.  Of course, they could have ridden the growth wave coattails of SalesForce.com, but nonetheless, it is good to see that they’re still around and well enough to go public.