I've been looking for a list of names of shrewd financial geniuses who shoulda known better. Of course there's Warren Buffett. Another guy I think is super bright and gets a lot of respect is Dick Grasso, and especially when Eliot Spitzer got his ass handed to him, Grasso had the last laugh. That was an entertaining and informative episode of Squawk Box. But there have got to be more...
So Dick Grasso lead to John Thain and John Thain led to Stan O'Neal. Wait. I know that name. Isn't that the black guy? So I look a little closer. See, he was top dog at Merrill Lynch. Remember Merrill? It's about to get sucked into Bank of America. O'Neal was the bossman and got the boot back almost exactly eleven months ago. Here's what New York Magazine said: (stolen whole cloth)
Former Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O'Neal takes a beating in Portfolio's profile of his replacement John Thain in their May issue. Thain, whose past offenses include putting the little-old-man house barber at the New York Stock Exchange out on the street and allegedly eating jelly on his bagels, comes off looking like Superman compared to O'Neal's sniveling Lex Luthor. Sure, it's not exactly news that O'Neal, who was fired in October of last year, was disliked, but writer Gary Weiss paints the scorn his former colleagues feel for him vividly: The brokers there "despised" him, the subprime-mortgage ventures he presided over were "freakishly ill-advised," in particular his acquisition of subprime "monstrosity" First Republic, which was "viewed as exhibiting all the strategic wisdom of a foray into Havana real estate in 1959." Former Merrill executive VP Win Smith gives the dagger a twist: "He was a mean person, a disrespectful person, and he drove out thousands of years of experience," he told the magazine. Yeeks. You almost feel bad for him — at least until you remember that he walked away with a $160 million severance package immediately after the bank suffered the largest losses in history. Eh, well. Cry on your pile o' money, O'Neal.
A quick check of Google shows that the day O'Neal split, the stock was at 65. It basically never reached that high again. Apres O'Neal, le deluge. But he was doing then, what everybody seems to be doing now, which is trying to merge with a bank big enough to have enough assets so that all that high finance might continue. So was he precient or not? It's not like any of these hotshots are talking anyplace that I can hear, but I'll keep snooping around for backstory, not just news.
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