Via Wall Street Journal here:

Pushed to the brink of collapse by the mortgage crisis, Bear Stearns Cos. agreed — after prodding by the federal government — to be sold to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. for the fire-sale price of $2 a share in stock, or about $236 million.

Bear Stearns had a stock-market value of about $3.5 billion as of Friday — and was worth $20 billion in January 2007. But the crisis of confidence that swept the firm and fueled a customer exodus in recent days left Bear Stearns with a horrible choice: sell the firm — at any price — to a big bank willing to assume its trading obligations or file for bankruptcy.

A week or so ago I wrote on this blog for my fellow Internet radio webcasters that direct traffic is the one to worry about. That I wouldn’t invest in any Internet radio companies who derive most of their listener numbers from radio directories solely on the basis of ranking at the top of the alphabetical sort.

I would make a parallel now with what happened to Bear Stearns. All the mortgage shenanigans of the prior years made it look like a super star. The sales were real, but what was sold was not. Similarly in Internet radio - the listeners are real from directories, but the reason they were there and the stickiness was not.

Now that the mortgage crisis is unraveling and there are no more pointless inflated sales (aka no more traffic from fake rankings) Bear Stearns has become worthless.