Lehman CFO Erin Callan: Back from Ugly Monday

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Maybe it took a significant event to get them over the hump of using that extraordinary regulatory power to make this kind of a decision. They debated a lot of issues about moral hazard. It's incredibly unfortunate the way the scenario played out for Bear Stearns, but I also am sympathetic to the challenges the Fed had in making the decision.

Is it fair to say JPMorgan took advantage of a crisis situation to get Bear on extremely beneficial terms?
Is it fair? Certainly it's a very smart deal for JPMorgan. But I think it will have reverberations for the industry that are unfortunate and that we'll be living with for a while.

How shocked were you when you saw the price for Bear?
Very shocked, because certainly I'd been getting a lot of feedback that it was $19 a share. That was kind of the story for at least 24 hours. So when one of my colleagues sent me an e-mail and said $2, I thought they had dropped a zero.

What does your gut tell you? Does this deal go through at this price?
It actually feels like it will, though not without some angst and debate and lawsuits.

I have a hard time understanding how things could change so fast and furiously for Bear. Can your business really reverse course like that in a 48-hour period, or was that perhaps a situation unique to Bear?
I think that will be the lingering question about our industry and our business model—and it should be. Liquidity is the thing that will kill you in a moment. It won't necessarily be writedowns. We obviously saw huge writedowns taken by other members of Bear's peer group, and they raised capital and came back for another day. So I think there were a number of factors related to how Bear managed its liquidity that were specific to that organization.

Let me ask you about this credit environment. How tough is it out there?
I think the market is worse than anybody who has been in the industry has seen for the better part of 40 years—including my CEO, Dick Fuld. What started in one or two asset classes in credit and fixed-income assets migrated over the course of the last six months into really virtually every asset class regardless of fundamentals and regardless of basic quality.

Maria Bartiromo is the anchor of CNBC's Closing Bell.