Just think: Less than three weeks ago Alan D. Schwartz was sunning himself in West Palm Beach without a care in the world. "He has a good twinkle in his eye for the future," former client Michael Eisner said when the former pro-baseball player scored his new gig as the CEO of Bear Stearns. But then Bear collapsed and sent Schwartz down a dark and lonely spiral, and it sounds as though the past few weeks have been a blur of balled-up Kleenex and reruns of All My Children. He emerged today to testify in front of the Senate Banking Committee about the events that led to the collapse. "Mr. Schwartz occasionally sounded plaintive," the Times reported, "as if he were still trying to digest the reality of his firm’s collapse."

“I never dreamed it would be as rapid as the thing that happened here,” he said at one point. “I never understood or dreamed it would happen as rapidly as it did.”

Grim. We can only hope that after it was all over Schwartz's mother bundled him up and took him home for a nice glass of warm milk.

Fed Officials Defend Rescue of Bear Stearns [NYT]
Related: Angry Bear [NYM]