From the category archives:

James Cayne

Still Searching for Signs of Life on the Bear Stearns Board

May 4, 2010

Corporate governance at the failed Wall Street giant had all the hallmarks of a disengaged boardroom stacked with cronies and dominated by insiders. Finally, Congress can shed some light on where the board was at Bear Stearns — or if it existed at all. Former Bear Stearns CEO James Cayne will be making a rare [...]

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Cayne and Greenberg: Two Peas in a Very Dysfunctional Bear Stearns Boardroom Pod

May 8, 2008

Much as we have long faulted James Cayne for his role in Bear’s implosion, responsibility for its ultimate failure is born by many actors, including the long-time head of its executive committee, Alan Greenberg. It proves once again that boards must actually direct. In Bear’s case, there is scant evidence that its independent directors were [...]

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Outrage of the Week: Jimmy Cayne Jumps into the Fed-Sponsored Lifeboat

March 28, 2008

He was, more than anyone, responsible for bringing Bear Stearns to its demise. Already fabulously compensated over many years, he has now been made even wealthier by the American taxpayer. On a cold April night in 1912, as the ill-fated Titanic was preparing for its unscheduled journey to the bottom of the Atlantic, White Star [...]

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Did Bear Stearns Really Have a Board? | Part 1

March 25, 2008

How this 85-year-old icon of Wall Street was governed was also a clue as to how it might fail. When rumors were circling the company and threatening its survival, it responded by issuing a strong statement denying liquidity problems. The board agreed. But astonishingly, the company disintegrated less than 48 hours later and was quickly [...]

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Outrage of the Week: Leadership Fiddles While Bear Stearns Burns

March 14, 2008

With absentee leaders like Jimmy Cayne at the top and a corporate governance culture straight out of the 1920s, the surprise is not that Bear Stearns fell into a confidence chasm. The surprise is that calamity did not strike earlier. When the subprime meltdown was already giving a chilling preview of coming attractions last summer [...]

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Better Late than Never: Cayne to Leave Bear Stearns Top Spot

January 7, 2008

We’ve had a few things to say about Bear Stearns’s CEO James Cayne over the past few months. He also made it into the Finlay ON Governance Year End Awards. He was not a winner. Just earlier today, we suggested that standards were slipping so badly in America’s boardrooms that:

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Memo to Sallie Mae’s Board: About That Change You Forgot

January 7, 2008

The board of SLM Corp., known in many circles as Sallie Mae, announced the appointment today of a new chairman and company CFO. They must have forgotten the other change they need to make: CEO Albert L. Lord.

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When Wall Street Gods Come Crashing Down from the Subprime Heavens

December 20, 2007

Declining bonuses this year? How about boards showing a little spine and demanding that executives give back a chunk of the oversized paychecks that were awarded in the years when these ill-fated decisions were being made. It’s dangerous to be walking around Wall Street these days. You never quite know when another company will hit [...]

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Falling Subprime Titans Raise Issue of Boardroom Vigilance…Again

November 5, 2007

Boards don’t just anoint an emperor CEO and remain a hapless bystander of events. Their job is to assess and oversee issues of risk, as well as the CEO’s performance. First it was Warren Spector, co-president of Bear Stearns. Next it was Merrill Lynch’s E. Stanley O’Neal. Yesterday it was Charles O. Prince of Citigoup. [...]

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