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Merrill Lynched
Forget, for a moment, all that scary stuff about Merrill Lynch’s synthetic paper crunch, and Stan O’Neil and his team “working to resolve the remaining impact from our positions.” Here’s the really scary stat in the bank’s Q3 figures, released on Wednesday:
Compensation and benefits expenses were $2.0 billion for the third quarter of 2007, compared with $3.9 billion in the third quarter of 2006.
But before the Thundering Herd simultaneously phone home and issue their other half with a profits warning, an “additional item” to the Merrill announcement adds:
Merrill Lynch remains focused on paying its best performing employees competitively. In the same vein, it may be necessary to accrue compensation expense at a higher level in the fourth quarter to ensure it can appropriately reward employees whose performance will drive future growth.
In the meantime, for the full horror show ($7.9bn writedown, continuing exposure of $20.9bn of ABS, CDOs and subprime, etc, etc) go here.
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The Merrill results and the whole story leading up to them are a real shocker. The real issue is the leaderrship of the company, O’Neil has been totally ruthless firing people , he cleared out whole groups of senior Merrill guys over the last 5 years, jusy go though the names, many because they just did not fit what he thought Merrills should be, or were a block to him. He killed off Mother Merrill but relpaced wit with what ? He sponsored the crazy expansion in fixed income, which started as usual with a purge, which led to all these losses and he shifted strategy yet others are held accountable. He was in charge of making sure risk management was in place. He should apply the standards and tolerance he has shown to others too himself. There is also the issue of why so much power was allowed to be concentrated in one man, CEO and Chairman and also why the board of directors allowed him so much absolute power.
Well, it turns out that bad was not good today - but I won’t gloat…
Good comment from Felix Salmon: “If Merrill couldn’t even judge the extent of its losses accurately at the end of September, there’s no reason whatsoever to believe that it has its act together now.”
In simple words, they haven’t accrued for the full bonuses yet because it was not a requirement nor preferred since had they done that the loss would have increased by another $2.0 billion pre tax.
Hmmm…I just wonder, whether all banks will learn or not..why are they trying desparately to do accounting gimmicks to reduce losses which will hit them next reporting season… since it is the brave new world of new financial order as mentioned in the markets live session today…
PM: Think he might have missed the introduction of the new financial order
PM: Where bad is good
NH: and good is good
NH: so any news good or bad is good news
NH: and so the market goes up
PM: Welcome to Draaismaland - C
NH: a bit like Alice in wonderland
NH: similar sort of logic