By Thursday night, it’s clear that Bear Stearns won’t make it through Friday morning without some kind of miracle. Everyone is desperate to somehow get to the weekend. Friedman discusses their options:
“… Then there was my favorite, which was actually, to coin a phrase from [Bear senior executive] Jeff Mayer, what we were going to call ‘pencils down.’ The theory was if we could get to the weekend–this was Thursday night–if we can get to the weekend, we’ve got a lot of time to figure things out. We’ll have everybody come in Friday, and just won’t let anybody do anything. So traders won’t trade because it was a big issue–if you know you’re bankrupt, and you can go out and you enter into transactions, are you committing fraud? We didn’t want to commit fraud. We didn’t want our people to commit fraud. Therefore, if we opened for business, no one could be allowed to trade. We would take requests to send out money, but we wouldn’t actually do anything. Pencils down. Everybody comes in. Nobody does anything.”
(excerpts from House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street)