Merrill is the next shop to go the way of BSC in my opinion. I predict that Bank of America will be their JPMorgan in shining armour. Will the merrill bull on braodway be renamed the "bank of america" bull??
Yes.......and the new bronze turds at the rear of the bull will be named Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith.
Legg Mason should be fine. They are pretty conservative (truly), and I highly doubt they bet the house on deadbeat mortgages, as Schwartz and Bear Stearns obviously did. Merrill? Anything is possible with those numb nuts.
Time will tell, however i think Legg will have a hard time. Huge redemption because of CFC last year, now more then 1 billion loss in BSC.
Hearing KO for MER. They'll have great scratch off bottle caps games. Like, win a branch office when you match the code. 15:25 MER Merrill Lynch: Color on today's trading/chatter (42.78 -3.85) -Update- There has been a lot of chatter about MER this afternoon with the stock showing relative weakness (MER -9% vs XLF -0.6%) and Bloomberg.com reporting that MER sued XL Capital Assurance (XL) over default protection on $3 bln of collateralized debt obligations that the bond-insurance unit of Security Capital Assurance (SCA) is seeking to void... Earlier today a financial blog discussed the potential for additional write-downs at MER and there has been very heavy put option trading. We don't have a lot of information on the MER situation (whether these CDOs have already been marked down, etc), but have heard several brokers are out defending the co. Although SCA's troubles and the idea of problems with CDO insurance have been known for some time, today's news seems to be re-kindling some of the fears we saw during the monoline insurer debacle.