From the beginning it was a seductive relationship, with mutual needs and desires overwhelming the warnings to proceed cautiously. Now one of the parties, Global Crossing, is said to owe about $95 million to the other, J. P. Morgan Chase, which has little chance of recovering more than pennies on the dollar. ... "[Global Crossing's founder] kept talking about future cash flows. His projections were based on selling off capacity on the fiber optic networks. I felt those were really one-time asset sales, rather than predictable cash flow from operations, and I didn't like the level of risk. I projected that there would be too much capacity because other people were then talking about building fiber optic undersea cables. Any increase in capacity would push prices down. ... Everyone basically got greedy that the good times would go on forever. People did a lot of things that in hindsight did not make sense. The truth is, they did not make sense when they were doing them."

Chase's Early Dalliances With Global Crossing