“Do we take a lot of risk? Yes,” Mack told the shareholder. “I think the firm has the capacity to take a lot more risk than it has in the past.”
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 in Salomon Smith Barney’s brokerage division, instantly turning Morgan Stanley, once an élite white-shoe institution, into the largest brokerage house in America. (See TIME’s special report “The Financial Crisis After One Year.”)
The financial crisis and its aftermath have dramatically changed investor perceptions, particularly with respect to the soundness of our financial system. In response, big financial firms are changing, but few firms have changed more than Morgan Stanley. The latest sign of Morgan’s transformation came two weeks ago when the firm announced that James Gorman would replace Mack in January. Unlike Mack, and nearly every other head of Morgan Stanley, Gorman has never been an investment banker. Gorman, a former McKinsey consultant, joined Morgan three years ago from Merrill Lynch, where he had run that firm’s brokerage force. At Morgan, he was in charge of revamping the firm’s brokerage division, and recently integrating the Smith Barney acquisition. Observers say Gorman’s background will likely move Morgan further away from its roots.
“When Gorman was named CEO that was a defining moment in Morgan’s history,” says Charles Geisst, a Wall Street historian and author of the book Collateral Damaged. “The large brokerage force is going to change Morgan. People begin to see you more as a distribution business than in the investment-banking business.”
How the Financial Crisis Changed Morgan Stanley – Stephen Gandel, TIME
