You've gotta give them credit for chutzpah. Even as it continues to reel from its post-subprime-meltdown meltdown, Bear Stearns Structured Equity Products – yeah, we said structured – had it in them to launch a batch of exchange-traded notes.

Largely overlooked in the midst of Friday’s 150-point Dow trip and stumblage, the world got its first BearLinx exchange-traded note, designed to track the performance of the Alerian Master Limited Partnership Select Index, "a comprehensive benchmark of energy-oriented" master limited partnerships.

Brought to you by Bear Stearns Structured Equity Products.

"This ETN is an innovative way for institutions and individual investors to access the MLP market in both a cost and operationally efficient manner," according Joshua Dunivant, salesperson in structured equity products, and obviously a man with a firm grasp of structured equity product sales gibberishbabble. So, two things:

1. It’s an ETN, not an ETF. In the normal course—Barclay’s Bank backs the seven previous ETNs issued in the US—that’s a distinction without too much of a difference. However:

2. According to the fund’s prospectus, the issue is a direct obligation of The Bear Stearns Companies Inc (Ratted A1 by Moody’s/A+ by S&P).

Full faith and credit of The Bear Stearns Companies Inc, huh? That and a quarter, we could talk for hours. Rated—BS, not the ETN—by Grumpy’s, and Standard and Poo? At, it should be noted, several clicks lower than some of the stuff that so recently, so famously blew-up in its investors’ faces. This should work out well.

So congratulations to the brave little soldiers who swapped 187,000-odd BSRs amongst themselves Friday, but NakedShorts is probably not alone in being of the view that paper with ‘Bear Stearns Structured’-anything on it should be watched at least as closely as Jimmy Cayne looking for a lost golf ball.

(Continue reading this story on Naked Shorts)

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