Merrill Lynch Spin-Off???

Assuming that all of you guys have been keeping up with what has been going on in with the banks. There is speculation that Bank of America may have to spin off Merrill Lynch.

This got me thinking, do you think that the Merrill guys actually want this happen? After having read a couple books on the financial crisis. The Merrill bankers really hated the the BofA bankers, and the fact that they had gotten bought out by a commercial bank from Charlotte. Part of me thinks that the Merrill guys want to be spun off, so they could go to back to being one of the white shoe wallstreet banks along with Goldman and Morgan Stanley.

Also this may actually be a good thing. If Merrill gets spun-off then BofA will very minimal activity in capital markets. If BofA ever gets passed this mortgage mess, then in a couple years it will most likely start increasing its presence in investment banking and start recruiting heavily.

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Best Response

This will never happen, unfortunately ; ). I've heard that it was only brought up in serious conversation as an option with very little viability of ever happening. It doesn't make sense for BofA as spinning off of ML would lose a very profitable arm of their business and really wouldn't do much to fix their mortgage issues (sans the excess tier III capital that ML carries, which is de minimis comp'ed to Countrywide) and much less the never ending lawsuits.

Also, the back office and support system that kept ML's bankers operational and focused on deals, is almost been completely dismantled by BofA. Even they did spin off ML, all that would be left standing would be a bunch of MD's and ibanking monkey's with email and black berry's that wouldn't work; more importantly no one to clear the expense accounts. Yes it would sweet to go back to the glory days of the "thundering herd" but no one (smart) is holding their breath.

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