Is it true: Bear Stearns collapse / JPMorgan rescue (Mar 2008)?

There's no solid evidence for it.

The claim judged here is that Bear Stearns was deliberately brought down by a coordinated campaign of naked short selling and false rumors, rather than by its own leverage and loss of funding. That claim has not cleared the evidence bar. The surrounding events are well documented: two Bear Stearns hedge funds collapsed in 2007, the firm's liquidity pool fell from $18.1 billion to $2 billion between 10 and 13 March 2008, and JPMorgan Chase bought it at about $2 a share (later about $10) with Federal Reserve financing. Short selling and put-option trading did surge beforehand, and SEC Chairman Christopher Cox and Bear CEO Alan Schwartz both described rumors producing a self-fulfilling run. Schwartz also told the Senate it looked as though people wanted to induce a panic, while saying he had no specific facts. But the SEC had brought no short-selling charges over Bear's failure as of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission's January 2011 report, SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro told the Commission the SEC had no information that manipulative short selling caused the collapse, and the SEC Inspector General reported that SEC staff had seen red flags in Bear's mortgage concentration and high leverage and did not act to limit them. Hedge fund managers Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin were acquitted of fraud in November 2009, in a case about their funds.