Bernstein's Brad Hintz on Lehman

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Einhorn of Greenlight Capital has led the charge against Lehman, and the Street seems to be listening. Is Lehman's situation as dire as he has been painting it?

Well, no.

Einhorn is basically saying that what Lehman said in the first quarter is not what it's saying now with regard to its portfolio. He's all but said Lehman is deceiving investors. Do you think CEO Dick Fuld and CFO Erin Callan have been as forthright as they might have been?

If you're asking me whether Lehman will win an award for best disclosure, the answer is no. But I don't think any brokerage firm will get that. Are there numbers gaps? Absolutely. I don't doubt that.

But it sounds like you think some of this is overdone.

Oh, on the concerns from the shorts, absolutely. There's no question it's overdone.

According to The New York Times, the Securities & Exchange Commission is investigating whether hedge funds helped drive down the shares of Bear Stearns and essentially put it out of business. Do you think that could be happening to Lehman today? And would [Treasury Secretary] Hank Paulson and regulators let another bank go down?

No, Lehman will not go down. We have the Federal Reserve behind it. By the Fed opening the discount window, it has injected a little bit of courage into the counterparties. So when Lehman says, "We're not borrowing much from the Fed," that's technically very true. But they are borrowing courage. Still, the earnings of the company aren't going to be stellar in the near-future. So I don't know whether it's an equity play at this point.

A lot of people have been suggesting that the worst on Wall Street is over, but then you look at Lehman's market cap and stock. Do you think we're on the edge of another market-crushing moment?

No. I think there's a realization that the rally that we saw in the credit markets this spring wasn't the sign of an imminent recovery of all the credit markets. It'll take us more time on that one. A number of the managements of these firms were saying, "We're in the seventh inning, we're in the eighth inning." We joked and said: "Sorry, but it's a doubleheader." The doubleheader is that, yes, the worst of the writedowns in the mortgage market are over. But the problem that we have is that in a slowing economy, bankruptcies rise; consumer credit losses rise. And we still have that ahead of us.

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