Sublime

Howie, inside Morgan Stanley, would lose $9 billion on a single mortgage trade, and remain essentially unknown, without anyone beyond a small circle inside Morgan Stanley ever hearing about what he’d done, or why.

But it compelled me to watch Jefferies more closely, a company whose namesake and origin, unlike Morgan Stanley, had a pretty non illustrious past (for starters, I had never worked at an established firm that had only one name).

In a matter of hours, Merrill Lynch, with a history of nearly one hundred years as one of the most storied names on Wall Street, would be sold to Bank of America for the biggest premium in the history of banking mergers. It was, as one newspaper later put it, as if Wal-Mart were buying Tiffany’s.

Anthony Drexel, of the long-established Philadelphia banking family, changing the firm to Drexel, Morgan & Co., with the older man again named first.

Commercial bank (e.g., Citibank) Investment bank (e.g., Goldman Sachs) Brokerage (e.g., Schwab, Fidelity)

Public equities—Stocks that trade on public market exchanges.

great deal since then.41