The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week: April 4

2. What Does Bear Do Now?

Persistent rumors that Bear Stearns BSC is alive and kicking have been greatly exaggerated.

Both Wall Street and Main Street forgot that the defunct broker is soon to be JPMorgan JPM or nothing at all, depending how you cut it.

Last week, protestors rallied at Bear Stearns', er, JPMorgan's headquarters on 46th and Madison Avenue in Manhattan to decry the government's alleged bailout of the once-formidable broker. The protestors contended that homeowners, who these days own their houses roughly to the same extent that Bear owns its building, are more deserving of a helping hand than Bear.

As the rabble-rousers marched through their usurper's well-furnished lair, few seemed to appreciate that the Fed gave Bear and its shareholders a raw enough deal. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon swallowed the bank in a firesale with not a little help from the Federal Reserve.

Several days later, Bear agreed to a deadline extension that allowed Thornburg Mortgage TMA to refinance. The act of clemency, which helped keep the troubled jumbo mortgage specialist solvent, was particularly sweet, considering that the same margin calls that threatened to decapitate Thornburg had brought Bear to its knees mere weeks earlier.

And anyway, Bear had very little to lose. After all, the money it lent to Thornburg will soon belong to JPMorgan.

Suffering from similar delusions, analysts at Bear, who will soon be analysts elsewhere if anywhere, downgraded real estate investment trust KKR Financial KKR on Tuesday. KKR still has something on Bear, though: It exists.

To put at least one question plaguing the financial markets to rest, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke appeared before Congress Wednesday. To arrest continuing misperceptions that Bear Stearns is alive, he eulogized the company, saying that without his intervention, the company would have gone under, creating mass confusion and crippling the entire financial system.

Dumb-o-meter score: 91. Hopefully, thanks to Ben's testimony, everyone will be on the same page next week.