Who Is Bear Stearns’ Biggest Loser?FINANCE
• Joseph Lewis, the British billionaire who built up his stake in Bear Stearns last summer, lost about $1.6 billion this past weekend, approximately half of his entire fortune. Bear’s biggest investor, Dallas-based money manager James Barrow, whose firm had a 9.95 percent stake, also lost big — at least $750 million. Activist shareholder Bruce Sherman and departed CEO James Cayne each lost big on their 5 percent stakes, although Cayne might not care so much: He just closed on a $28.24 million Plaza pad and spent late last week playing bridge in a tournament in Detroit. [Bloomberg]
• Meanwhile, Bear’s “fire sale” is spreading like wildfire down the street, singing Lehman Brothers, among other top banks. [DealBook/NYT]
• And Barry Diller’s IAC is “sputtering.” [NYT]
photo op
Second Avenue Subway: Actual, Real Work Begins, Almost
Never mind announcements and plans and ceremonial ground-breakings and wall-tappings; construction on the Second Avenue Subway is now, finally, actually, really here. Two lanes of Second Avenue in the Nineties will be closed to allow the MTA to drop the massive tunnel-boring down to subway level, and, as our compatriots at Curbed noted yesterday, work on the hole is beginning. In the above Curbed photo, what that low-Nineties stretch of Second is going to look like for the next decade or so. Fun!
Second Avenue Subway Scene: Barriers, Fences, Dismay [Curbed]