JP Eats Bear Stearns

March 19 (Bloomberg) -- As more than 14,000 Bear Stearns Cos. employees watch the value of their stock sink and brace for firings, some of the company's 550 brokers who handle individual investors' accounts are receiving job offers from competitors promising windfalls of $2 million or more.

"The brokers aren't going to get hurt,'' said Mitch Vigeveno, chief executive officer of Turning Point Inc., an executive-search firm in Safety Harbor, Florida. "They have a book of business they can move. The ones who are going to get hurt are other employees, like people in operations and marketing.''

Bear Stearns employees own about one-third of the common stock, according to the company's Web site. High and mid-level executives participate in a compensation plan tied to income per share, a program that until recently had "worked very well for a long time,'' said Alan Johnson, a New York-based compensation consultant. The company spent $1.5 billion on stock compensation from 2005 to 2007, last year's annual report said.

"It's publicly known that a lot of individuals in the company own a good part of the company so we clearly believe there was value in the organization,'' Kanwardeep Ahluwalia, Bear Stearns head of risk management for Europe and Asia, told Bloomberg Television March 17. "But when there is a run on the bank there's nothing you can do. I guess we have to grin and bear it and move on to a strong partnership with JPMorgan."

---- JPMorgan is part of JPMorgan Chase & Co., a "leading global financial services firm with assets of $1.5 trillion and operations in more than 50 countries."

Under the impetus of Ronnie Reagan the game was megamergers, hostile takeovers, corporate raiding, and bailouts of course. The game is played by CEOs (front men for the power behind the scenes) who move companies around as if pieces on a board game - buying, selling, and dumping businesses.

As KAB said last summer, the big boys have been there done this before. When the bubbles burst, never fear. The Wall Street boys, always in search of big money, will find a way to turn bubbles into a lot of loot, or loot a lot of bubbles. And party harder when the feds step in with your tax dollars.

The big boys created the Great Depression to their benefit. Their spawn and protégé have created subsequent economic downturns, recessions, inflation, stagnation, fake runs on a bank, boom, bust, bubbles.

The name of the game is Corporate Cannibalism.

KAB advice, based on my dad's phrase of "paper rich, dollar poor" - buy tangibles: gold, land, gems, canned goods, ammo, shotguns ....