The receptionists at Bear Stearns look at each other, flabbergasted. One pulls nervously at her red hair, while another speaks agitatedly into the phone. They don't know what to do. Around 100 angry homeowners have just marched into the elegant lobby of the New York investment bank.

It is Wednesday afternoon of last week. Traders in business suits, about to head out for a sandwich or a business lunch, congregate behind the security desks in the lobby.

Suddenly they find themselves face-to-face with a group of ordinary Americans gathered together between tropical plants and thick granite walls: whites, blacks, Latinos, blue-collar workers, retirees and mothers with children. The protestors wear yellow T-shirts imprinted with slogans reading "Sharks beware!" in big letters. They hold up signs that read: "Support Main Street - Not Wall Street," "Chase -- what about my home?" and "Where is our bail-out?" And as the bankers head out to lunch, they shout angry slogans at their backs.

Then a pastor from Washington picks up a megaphone. His name is Graylan Hagler, a furious, bearded man with his hair in a gray ponytail. He talks about the "greedy profiteers here at Bear Stearns and JP Morgan," saying: "These folks knew what they were doing."

It is a bizarre and important moment in the ongoing American real estate and banking crisis, the first time a hint of class struggle has been seen.

In one corner are the homeowners who are now barely able or unable to pay their mortgages, and have received little real help from the government to date. In the other are the traders of Bear Stearns. They were the most foolhardy among speculators, gambling away huge sums of money on questionable mortgage deals. When their venerable bank collapsed in mid-March, the US Federal Reserve promptly provided them with a $30-billion (€19-billion) bailout.

The crisis in the global financial markets is still in full swing, while the real consequences for banks and economies are still anybody's guess. In a new internal report, the German banking regulatory agency BaFin estimates that, in a worst-case scenario, international banks could lose upwards of $600 billion (€380 billion).

But even as crisis management efforts are in full swing, the search for the next high-yield business opportunity is already underway amid the wreckage -- largely unnoticed by the general public.

On Wall Street, contaminated mortgage-backed securities, which are considered about as attractive as toxic waste and which everyone was until very recently desperate to unload, are currently undergoing an astonishing image makeover. For a growing number of investors, these securities are seen as a bargain once again -- jewels just waiting to be picked up out of the dirt and polished.

This mindset has hedge funds discreetly collecting investment capital from their affluent customers worldwide. Convinced that tremendous opportunities are there for the picking, hedge funds are now competing with the so-called "vulture funds," which deal in distressed debt, for the most promising cadavers. More than 70 hedge funds are already busy combing through this market, with major Wall Street players such as Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs and private equity billionaire Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone instructing their staff to do the necessary footwork.

Sums running into the billions are ready to be spent, but is this the right time to invest? Or could prices drop even further?

"Money, by and large, still sits on the sidelines," David Peress of the Boston-based hedge fund Crystal Capital told Reuters. "One recurring theme you hear is, 'I don't want to be the guy that catches the falling knife.'"

'A Once-in-a-Generation Opportunity'

But that caution is beginning to wane. Larry Fink is the CEO of Blackrock, a New York investment group with assets of $1.3 trillion (€823 billion) under management. Fink, who saw the real estate crash coming, kept his company more or less out of the subprime debacle. Now he feels that the time has come for him to invest. "I'm telling all our clients worldwide that for long-term investing, the credit markets represent great values," he says.

The number of fire sales continues to grow, while major banks are still writing off billions. Nevertheless, Fink and his hedge fund partners established a new company last week, Private National Mortgage Acceptance, which specializes entirely in the ailing mortgage business.

The mood is excellent among his staff. "This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for investing," says one manager, who prefered to remain anonymous. His team is buying up ordinary mortgages that have not been hacked to pieces and poured into Wall Street loan packages.

A large share of the mortgage market consists of these old-fashioned real estate loans, which have been dragged down in the subprime maelstrom. Hardly any banks can afford to invest in products with the word "mortgage" in their names -- their anxious shareholders only want to get rid of these types of securities. As a result, inventories can be had at a substantial discount. "Markets have overreacted," says the Blackrock investment manager.

Even America's second-largest public pension fund is investing again. "People are assuming that all mortgages are questionable," Chris Ailman, the chief investment officer of the California State Teachers' Retirement System, told the Financial Times. "The spread widening that we've seen is an overshoot, and it's just too pessimistic."

Does this mean that the good times have returned, at least in the world of hedge funds and their investors?

Many of them believed that this was the case weeks and months ago -- and lost spectacular sums of money as a result.

Industry star Ron Beller, co-founder of the Peloton Hedge Fund, was among the hardest hit. Beller rose to fame at US investment bank Goldman Sachs when his secretary defrauded him of several million pounds using fake money transfers, and he was the source of negative headlines in late February once again when Peloton's ABS Master Fund collapsed.

Beller and his associates did everything right at first. Their award-winning fund earned its investors returns of more than 85 percent in 2007, because the fund managers had bet correctly on a collapse of the US market for subprime mortgages.

The Peloton team collected fresh capital last fall so that it could jump in at the right moment and buy up mortgage-backed securities at bargain-basement prices. That perfect moment seemed to have arrived in January, when Beller was convinced that prices for mortgage-backed securities with high ratings were about to rebound.

But his bet would prove to be a serious mistake. To the surprise of many, prices dropped in early February once again, and Peloton, deeply in debt with banks, was forced to sell off $2 billion (€1.3 billion) in securities at rock-bottom prices.

It spelled the end for the former top fund. Peloton had grabbed the falling knife.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan