The photo mystery that baffled Wall Street is solved after 15 years

McDaniel emailed the photos from an anonymous account he set up for the prank: [email protected].

Emails sent by the friends and reviewed by Bloomberg, as well as between the Yahoo account and Bess Levin, a Dealbreaker blogger at the time, corroborate their story.

“I can’t think of a photo that better encapsulates the ’08 crisis than the photo of the two bucks scotch-taped to the door of Bear Stearns,” said Levin, now a politics correspondent for Vanity Fair. “Except maybe that photo of the Lehman Brothers bankers lined up in front of the window in London like they were facing a firing squad.”

The trio never expected their prank would go beyond the blogosphere, but once professional photographers spotted the bill, the image was plastered on news sites including Reuters and the Wall Street Journal, which deemed it one of the top photos of 2008.

News outlets usually rely on rote pictures for banks in the news, said Davidov, who also works at a venture fund.

“What do you use as an image? A logo, a skyscraper?” he said. “The media needs something that’s more exciting, and we created this.”

For the Bear Stearns employees who worked at the company’s Madison Avenue offices, thousands of whom would be fired over the next few months, the image of the $US2 bill stuck indelibly in their minds.

“It stunned people as they walked in,” said Kathryn Rooney Vera, who was an analyst at Bear at the time. “It was a tangible and visual manifestation of the magnitude of the fall of this major Wall Street bank — a powerhouse reduced down to this obscure $US2 bill. I’ll never forget it.”

The trio struck again a year later, when Citigroup stock fell below $US1.

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One of Davidov’s $US2 bills was torn in half and taped to the door of the bank’s midtown skyscraper, and McDaniel again sent an image to Dealbreaker.

While it was published, the second prank didn’t gain the same traction.

Bloomberg