Troubled CEO Was Near Death As Firm Problems Piled Up
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And Cayne, 74, revealed for the first time that he came to close to death in September, and spent 10 days in hospital after contracting sepsis, which was triggered by a severe prostate infection.
Cayne, of course, survived, but the 85-year-old firm he had done much to help build, did not. The former Bear CEO admits that, in the final analysis, he wasn't up to the task of saving his firm. 'When you become roadkill, when you happen to have lost some weight (Cayne lost 30lb due to his illness) and you're not really healthy, but you know one thing - you know that you worked your ass off, and you're not smart enough to know the answer. That's tough'. When asked what losing $1bn of his net worth meant to him (Cayne's paper loss on the difference between the peak price of his Bear stock and the eventual JPMorgan acquisition price), the banker said: 'I felt nothing (he is still worth around $600m). You got a bad grade on your test. That's it. No appeal. I felt sad (however) for me and sad for my Bear Stearns family'.
Finally, one-year after the start of the credit crunch, Financial News reports that $2.7 trillion has been wiped off the value of US and European financial stocks since the crisis began. And that, so the newspaper calculates, is equivalent to the gross domestic product of the UK, or the potential final bill for the Iraq war, or buying Citi 29 times over.
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