Word: firm
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...year Charles Edward Merrill founded the firm we now know as Merrill Lynch & Co., he was 54 years old and had already lived an extraordinarily productive and visible life. A poor boy from the backwaters of Florida, Merrill was forced to leave college by lack of funds. But he schemed his way to Wall Street and made himself wealthy by the time...
...name Wall Streeter to predict the Great Crash of 1929. Indeed, in the months leading up to the Crash, Merrill pleaded (to no avail) with President Calvin Coolidge to speak out against speculation. By February 1929, Merrill was so sure the end was near that he liquidated his firm's stock portfolio, an act that made him famous in October, when the Crash finally came...
...Wall Street insiders but should also be an avenue for the broad mass of Americans. Decades before founding Merrill Lynch, he coined the phrase "Bringing Wall Street to Main Street." For the last 17 years of his life, that's what he tried to achieve with his new firm, which became a laboratory for his grand experiment. Today when we conjure up the names of the great American financiers, we tend to think of people like J.P. Morgan and Warren Buffett and even Michael Milken. But none of them had the effect on American life that Charlie Merrill...
...Wall Street. "Demystification had been the key to [my father's] great success," James Merrill later wrote in his memoir. "No more mumbo-jumbo from Harvard men in paneled rooms; let the stock market's workings henceforth be intelligible even to the small investor." To that end, the firm published an endless stream of reports, magazines, pamphlets--11 million pieces in 1955 alone--with titles like How to Invest. Under Merrill the firm gave seminars across the country, with child care provided so that both husband and wife could attend. It set up tents in county fairs...
...Merrill's death, in 1956, the firm had some 400,000 clients and had become the largest brokerage in the country, a distinction it holds to this day. But Merrill died a sorely disappointed man. Wall Street had not rushed to follow his example, as he had hoped, and the majority of the country, still scarred by the memory of the Depression, was not ready to plunge back into stocks. He was simply too far ahead of his time...