Word: weill
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...merged $115 billion First Chicago NBD Corp. All this came just a week after insurance and brokerage giant Travelers Group announced plans to tie the knot with Citicorp, the second largest bank in the U.S.--a $76 billion marriage, not just of services but of two industry titans: Sanford Weill, who emerged from a messenger job at Bear Stearns to conquer Wall Street; and John Reed, the no-compromises Citibanker who manhandled his firm back from the edge of insolvency in the late 1980s. Suddenly the world of finance began to look less like the Norman Rockwell thrifts that built...
...financial "supermarkets" at American Express and Sears proved that in the '80s and today the number of small community-oriented banks is growing in towns where mergers have wiped out local institutions, leaving corporate branches and higher fees in their wake. "You have to be a low-cost provider," Weill emphasizes...
Affable and street-wise, Weill, 65, grew up middle class in Brooklyn and started his career on Wall Street in the 1950s as a messenger for Bear Stearns Co. By the early 1960s he had raised $200,000, and 15 acquisitions later he built Shearson Loeb Rhoades into the nation's second largest brokerage. In 1981 American Express bought Shearson, and Weill tagged along, hoping one day to succeed CEO James Robinson. He preceded him instead, leaving in 1985; Robinson was bounced...
Dealmakers like Weill insist that won't be a problem. And he may be right for a different reason: the history of megamergers is that they tend not to work as planned. "When you create these oversize companies, they become vulnerable by definition," says Porter Bibb, a senior investment banker at Ladenburg Thalmann. Big firms can't react to small opportunities, so new businesses pop up to fill the void. Some inevitably grow enough to challenge the giants. Indeed, every merger phase in the U.S. in the past 30 years has been followed by a period of divestitures as companies...
...really knows. But because of Sandy Weill, we just might find...