I just got back from a too-brief visit to The Ancestral Homeland, a place that always makes me nostalgic for a past that never was. As I have surely said before, had my mother not dragged me away against my will at age 11 kicking and screaming, I almost certainly would have fled the place at age 18.
TAH is one of those places that makes you think of the song where Dar Williams sings "bet that crumbling mill town/was a booming mill town in its day." Massive factories built in the 1800s sit boarded up and economic redevelopment has been tried and failed probably a couple of dozen times since Amalgamated Industries and Acme Manufacturing started slowing production down in the 1960s. Amalgamated's building and logo still looms over downtown, with probably 5% of the workforce it had 30 years ago, and I think that the only reason the place is still running at all is that it's cheaper than paying to close it for good.
Like a lot of medium sized industrial towns, a 15 minute drive takes you into the sticks. The rolling hills outside of town were filled with the autumnal gold and scarlet of maple trees in sunlight. The weather was simply amazing -- clear and blue and comfortably cool. I drank some fresh cider and, like Proust and his cookie, was taken back to the past. In my case, it was to an apple-picking outing with my parents a few years before my dad got sick. Just before we left in the wood-paneled Country Squire, we stopped to watch them press the dropped apples to make cider, and then each drank some right from the press.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
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!
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!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)