This article struck me as odd. "I," Joe Schmoe investor, don't need bailing out because I don't lever my investments NINE times, as Bear Stearns' funds did. I used to work as an RMBS trader at a hedge fund, and that is an extreme amount of leverage for securities that are thinly traded and subject to monthly mark-to-markets which are guesstimates at best. So did Bear "take one for the team?" Maybe. Or maybe, once they realized how badly their risk management appeared, they did it to mollify the strong, widely-heard criticism of what went awry at a supposedly expert debt shop. Sure, Wall Street is a tangled web, and CDOs (and CDO-squareds) further complicate the interrelationships between instruments and institutions. But Bear did this to save their own hiney first and foremost, not to spare their Wall Street brethren. It is a rare day that Wall Street is altruistic, and this is not an example of it either.