Jimmy Cayne apologised for the first time to Bear Stearns shareholders and employees on Thursday as the investment bank he helped build into a scrappy powerhouse formally disappeared into Wall Street history as the biggest victim of the credit crisis. Cayne’s comments, to a packed auditorium at Bear headquarters, came as shareholders approved the sale of the bank to JPMorgan Chase for $10 a share, or $2.2bn. Bear traded above $150 a share as recently as a year ago. At a meeting that lasted less than 10 minutes, Cayne said he wanted to “personally apologise for what has happened” and added: “We just ran into our own hurricane.” But Bear employees and shareholders were clearly not sympathetic to his “run-on-the-bank” argument.
