DEBORAH MARCHINI, CNN ANCHOR: Lehman Brothers is reportedly considering a bid for Bear Stearns that could be worth $19 billion.</s>DAVID HAFFENREFFER, CNN ANCHOR: And that story is in today's "Financial Times." And Hugh Carnegie joins us now from the "FT"'s London newsroom. And, Hugh, how sure are we that this deal will take place?</s>HUGH CARNEGY, WORLD NEWS EDITOR, "FINANCIAL TIMES": Well, I think we're at the very preliminary stage here, and our report makes that very clear this morning, that this is a question of Lehman Brothers being interested in considering. We don't believe that at this state we're talking about serious talks yet, so there's some way to go. But what we're looking at here I think everybody's got the radar on, certainly we have, for more consolidation in the investment banking scene. And here we have two middle ranked players who clearly are either targets or potential bidders in the consolidation game. And this may be a pairing we'll see come up on the screen now.</s>MARCHINI: What about other possible pairings, specifically are any international firms interested in buying either of these companies?</s>CARNEGY: Well, yes, I think you would see that some of the European banks that are interested in building up their scale in investment banking could be interested in maybe either of these two; Deutsche Bank is one that comes to mind, certainly. We saw recently CSFB, the big Swiss bank, took over DLJ. So we think that there's going to be more of these type of deals, and certainly Europeans want to be in the game.</s>HAFFENREFFER: All right, Hugh, thank you very much. Hugh Carnegy from the "Financial Times."
'Financial Times': Lehman Brothers Considering Bid for Bear Stearns