From a networking perspective (and that is, after all, the Muckety world view), these are fascinating times.

Using expert consultants is common in business and government. SEC Inspector General David Kotz used one in his report that slams the agency for missing numerous red flags that foreshadowed the collapse of Bear Stearns.

Recent history has not been kind to James E. Cayne, the CEO who has been blamed for the collapse of Bear Stearns, the investment bank that was sold at a bargain basement price to JP Morgan Chase earlier this year.

If there were ever a career civil servant’s Hall of Fame, Timothy F. Geithner would no doubt be an inductee.

The animosity between Bear Stearns’s former chairman Alan Greenberg and its soon-to-be former chairman James Cayne has become painfully public.

Erin Callan doesn’t look like a master of the universe in her crocheted dresses and bright-red leather jackets.

Things are looking up, but only slightly, for Bahama billionaire Joe Lewis.

Bear Stearns, drowning in debt from its mortgage-related investments, received a lifeline yesterday from the Federal Reserve of New York.

Acting through JPMorgan Chase, the fed provided a line of credit to keep the bank solvent.

Alan Schwartz’s predecessor as CEO of Bear Stearns spent too much time on the golf course and at the bridge table, critics say.

That shouldn’t be the case for Schwartz, named to the top spot this week. Besides his demanding job, Schwartz is very involved in philanthropy and community affairs.

In the end, it would seem that the bottom line at Bear Stearns Cos. for James Cayne was the bottom line.

The investment bank’s leader went through public relations hell in November when The Wall Street Journal reported that he had spent a lot of time playing either golf or bridge in July while his company was struggling with losses in its sub-prime mortgage funds.

In a classic fiddling-while-Rome-burns story, the Wall Street Journal traced the activities of James Cayne, the CEO of Bear Stearns Cos. this summer.

While units of Bear Stearns, an investment and banking powerhouse, were collapsing because of the credit crisis in the subprime mortgage market, Cayne was out of reach for hours at a time, the Journal reported Thursday.

Not surprisingly – he’s a CEO after all – Cayne was incommunicado at times on the golf course.

But at other times he was, hold on to your hats, playing bridge.

The subprime mortgage mess claimed its first big Wall Street name Sunday as Bear Stearns forced out co-president Warren Spector.

Bear Stearns, which had two of its hedge funds collapse in June erasing more than $1.5 billion in capital, is a big player in bonds that back high-risk mortgages.

Spector, seen by some as the eventual successor to Bear Stearns CEO James Cayne, resigned. At a board meeting Sunday, directors determined that Alan Schwartz would be the sole president of the company.

Does the Securities and Exchange Commission favor business over investors?

Absolutely not, says chairman Chairman Christopher Cox, a former free-market Republican congressman.