As you read this, it has been almost three months since the collapse of Bear Stearns. Fill in your own adjective to describe that event—amazing, historic, shocking—I think they all apply. Bear Stearns employees went home on Friday, March 14, fearful that their firm would be out of business by the time business resumed on Monday morning. Bear, of course, had been under enormous scrutiny and pressure since last summer when the two hedge funds that were heavily invested in mortgage-related securities collapsed. That turned out to be a telling sign of the troubles in the subprime crisis that has cost the industry billions of dollars in losses.

Bear brokers spent the weekend copying their files and cleaning out their desks. We were told of long queues at the printers and copy machines, and mini-panics while searching for replacement toner cartridges. Even though JPMorgan Chase & Co. came to their "rescue" on Monday, many Bear brokers left anyway, having already struck their deals. Frenetic interviewing continued throughout the week while the shockingly low $2-per-share offer remained the price of the acquisition. Rumors hit the street of JPMorgan Chief Executive Officer James Dimon making "leave my people alone or you will never do business with JPMorgan again" calls to Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch CEOs. Ultimately, the purchase price was raised to $10 per share, and brokers at the $500,000 level and higher were offered 100% retention packages.

As I write this in mid-April, things have gotten substantially less jumpy. Bear brokers have been able to calm their clients, thanks to JPMorgan's strong name. Panic has been replaced by careful consideration of available options in the marketplace. As a group, Bear brokers have a high percentage of "middle markets" business. That is, they serviced not only high-net-worth individuals, but also midsize corporations, all under the umbrella of Bear's Private Client Services (PCS) division. I suspect that a number of the "shotgun marriages" that occurred immediately after the collapse will prove to be difficult transitions for both the advisors and the hiring firms.

In a sane and orderly interviewing environment, a hiring firm will carefully screen these types of middle-market accounts, whether fixed income or equity, to discern whether there are conflicts or not with existing brokers at the new firm. The Ides of March this year was anything but sane and orderly. I just cannot believe such quick hires will all be successful. (Of course, many of these advisors had been out interviewing since the summer when Bear's problems began, and then pulled the trigger once the collapse happened.)

The other side of the coin, and the problem for the Bear brokers who have stayed, is the uncertainty surrounding what the "new" JPMorgan/Bear platform will look like. Will there be institutional or high-net-worth client conflicts between legacy Bear and JPM? Is there a point at which JPM says that too many people have left and PCS will simply not exist at the combined firm? Though Dimon personally has a history of building and running a major retail brokerage shop, JPMorgan, at least prior to the Bear acquisition, has had a culture of running the high-net-worth private bank in a way that connects the client to the firm itself, and not to the teams of advisors who cover the account.

Regular readers of this column will remember (hopefully!) that I've written before about the enormous pressure that branch managers face when recruiting from the competition. The most effective of these managers successfully differentiate themselves by selling their branch culture, their firm's culture and platform, themselves and, of course, the deal. In a shortened sales cycle at the height of a crisis, managers find out that there is little time to differentiate themselves, and that their own firm is likely to have been tainted by mega-losses. Indeed, since Bear brokers lost such a huge portion of their net worth in the collapse of Bear's stock price and the sales cycle became so compressed in the panic of a crisis, everything seems to default to the deal.

A compressed sales cycle, zealous managers under enormous pressure to get their share of Bear folks and advisors making quick and relatively uninformed decisions, is a combination that leads me to one thought: a "Bear bubble." Keeping in mind I've been wrong many times before, here's another Sarch prediction: Those advisors who moved fastest will be disappointed in their own choices and, in turn, will prove to be disappointing, even disastrous, hires. There will be management openings at once-proud branches being crushed under the weight of a damaged profit-and-loss statement, hemorrhaging red ink from a bad, huge deal paid to a now-struggling former Bear broker.