In another one of those weird coincidences lately, an allegedly sleep-deprived Wall Street CEO decided to buy Bear Stearns today, on the same night that 60 Minutes ran a long segment about how getting less than seven hours of sleep a night severely and negatively affects decision-making ability.
JP Morgan Chase will buy Bear Stearns, at a remarkable 93 percent discount from its Friday closing price -- another, and not the last, effect of the Republican Bush/Greenspan economic crisis.
The sleep-deprived detail, below.
According to the NYT story, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon "slept less than four hours the entire weekend" that he was working on this deal.
As we all know from personal experience, sleeping two hours or less a night is not a good thing.
The 60 Minutes story featured leading sleep researchers who said, among other things:
Well, the first finding, and it stunned us, was there's a cumulative impairment that develops in your ability to think fast, to react quickly, to remember things. And it starts right away.
A single night at four hours or five hours or even six, can in most people, begin to show affects in your attention and your memory and the speed with which you think. A second night it gets worse. A third night worse. Each day adds an additional burden or deficit to your cognitive ability.
It seems that Dimon made a good deal; Bears Stearns' Madison Avenue headquarters building alone is, allegedly, worth four times what JP Morgan Chase will pay for the whole company.
But JP Morgan Chase is also buying a Bears Stearns' "balance sheet that is packed with financial landmines," overloaded with shitpile "investments" that are evidently, given the buyout price, worth a lot less than nothing.
How much less, no one really knows.
This is also bad news for thousands of Bear Stearns employees, who will soon be unemployed.
And Dimon will not lose any sleep over that.