Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky.

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones,
So let it be with Caesar.
The noble Brutus hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it.*

*(This and all italics courtesy of Mr. Jennifer Lopez, as written by Joseph Fiennes)

Who will shed a tear for the death of Merrill Lynch?

It is true that it died at the hand of The Market, its old friend, because of the foolishness of its recent leaders. Some now say that the specific Brutus in this tale may be Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan, and the dagger used was a $10 billion collateral call, but -- like Big Jules -- Merrill was the one who put itself in position to go down.

He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?

Ah, but mighty Merrill wasn't always such a Wall Street player. It gained its size, its power, and its once-unimaginable buckets of money by retail brokerage. It was derisively referred to as "We The People" or "the thundering herd" because of its large number of branch offices in places like Omaha and Memphis and St. Louis. It created solid relationships with several generations of customers, and in essence rebuilt the country's capital markets (after the crippling blow of the Great Depression) by popularizing investments in stock with people who weren't children or grandchildren of Robber Barons. Upper middle class customers across the country poured money into the stock market for the first time through Merrill, and other firms followed the Bull from Wall Street to Main Street.

Merrill seemed to set the standard -- its training programs, its marketing, its approach were all emulated by its competitors. And for the most part, its offices were at the top of the pecking order in most towns. (For example, the chamber of commerce in my town always had the local Merrill branch manager on the executive committee. Partly because of longevity -- he had been around forever, while the Dean Witter/Smith Barney/PaineWebber guys seemed to shuffle in and out of town too quickly, and they got stuck on hospitality or running the golf tournament.)

Merrill changed, like we all do. And who knows how accurate the argument is that Stan O'Neal gutted the culture of Merrill, and that this cultural change is what is to blame for the death of Merrill by creating the short-term outlook that put the toxic sludge on its books. But it seems clear that O'Neal's regime did change Merrill by hiring leadership that had not grown up with Merrill, and firing or early retiring those who "bled Merrill blue." Hiring number-crunchers from other firms. Changing the retail brokers' relationships with their clients by such things as imposing dollar minimums for accounts and closing branches.

But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?

Indeed. Tonight I shall have a Bushmills or three in mourning for the Merrill Lynch of Charlie Merrill, of Win Smith, and even of Don Regan. Up the Republic!