After lots of annoying bridge jokes, pot jokes, Detroit and Nashville jokes and golfing jokes over the past year, longtime Bear Stearns leader and bona fide godfather of Wall Street James Cayne apologized to shareholders. (Not to mention took the flak like a man.) Bear may fade into history as the biggest casualty of the subprime crisis, but you can’t say it didn’t live and die by the sword with panache. Here, Jimmy offers up a bit of parting wisdom.

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.

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