June 23, 2008

Let's say you run a "trust-based" business, where customers' confidence in your surviving in business is crucial to their willingness to buy your service. After a series of reverses, you begin to wonder whether your fund is headed for the status of "toast". Do you rush to the nearest microphone and announce that to the public, thus ensuring in a self-fulfilling prophecy that it will become toast even if you weren't convinced that was a certainty before? Or, like Bear Stearns hedge fund managers Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, do you instead steel yourself for eventual federal prosecution, complete with camera-ready perp walk?