Word: banking
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What a difference a financial crisis makes. Mack has spent much of the past year putting Morgan Stanley on safer ground. He has dramatically lowered borrowing and shut down the firm's proprietary trading desk. He changed Morgan from a Wall Street dealer to a bank holding company, and more than tripled the firm's deposit base, which is a safer source of capital. And in a major break from the bank's 70-year history he de-emphasized investment banking as the driver of Morgan Stanley's profits. In June, he completed the purchase of a majority stake...
...Morgan Stanley's annual meeting, CEO John Mack fielded a question from a worried investor. Mack's firm had had a good 2006 and early 2007, but the questioner was concerned that much of the new profits seemed to be coming from increased borrowing and bets the bank was making with its own capital. Mack answered defiantly...
...bigger losses should its traders get things wrong. Based on its trading activity now, Goldman says it could lose as much as $250 million in a day should its bets go wrong, up 30% from a year ago. What's more, even though Goldman has become a bank holding company, like Morgan, it has done little to begin to attract more deposits...
...Morgan, unlike Goldman, seems to be really interested in building up its deposit base. Last year, the firm hired former Wachovia executive Cece Sutton to run its retail-banking division. Last month, Morgan said it would soon be adding more employees in Charlotte and New York to help expand its banking operations. Already the bank has nearly tripled its customers' deposits to just over $100 billion...
...hires come at a time when the bank's traditional investment-banking operations seem to be shrinking. Overall, Morgan has lowered its payrolls by 8% in the past year, but its ranks of investment bankers have fallen by a slightly steeper 10%. And in underwriting, a key investment-banking business, Morgan has continued to lose ground. Through the first six months of this year, Morgan ranked as the sixth largest underwriter of stock and bond offerings, down from fourth two years...