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Lack of conscience aided Morgan Stanley. (Commentry).


HENRY Blodget Henry Blodget (born 1966) is a former securities analyst who was senior Internet analyst for Merrill Lynch during the dot-com bubble.

Blodget received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University and began his career as a freelance journalist and was a proofreader for
, Jack Grubman, Frank Quattrone Frank Quattrone (born 1956) is a former investment banker at Credit Suisse First Boston who helped bring dozens of companies public during the 1990s tech boom, including Netscape, Cisco, and Amazon.com.  and Mary Meeker Mary G. Meeker (born September ??, 1959 in rural Portland, Indiana, USA) is an influential[1] Wall Street securities analyst and investment banker primarily associated with dot coms and the 1990s internet bubble.  were Wall Street's best-known promoters of the Internet-telecom boom.

A few years ago, they were spoken of in a single breath, and in flattering tones, but those times now feel as ancient as Mesopotamia.

For more than a year, New York New York, state, United States
New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of
 Attorney General Eliot Spitzer Eliot Laurence Spitzer (born June 10 1959 ) is an American lawyer, politician and the current Governor of New York. Spitzer was elected governor in the November 2006 election.  has made as good a political living off the three men as has ever been made on Wall Street. All three are meeting grisly ends.

Spitzer rooted out and publicized a few of Blodget's old e-mails, in a way that anyone who followed Blodget's career knew badly distorted the man's motives and character. Now Blodget is the subject of a probe that may lead to a lifetime ban from the securities industry and a multimillion-dollar fine.

Grubman has been fined $15 million and banished from the securities industry. And while Frank Quattrone's fate is not yet known he was charged with obstructing a probe of Credit Suisse First Boston Credit Suisse First Boston was originally the trading name of the Financière Crédit Suisse-First Boston, a London-based 50-50 investment banking joint venture formed in 1978 between the First Boston Corporation and Credit Suisse.  - he faces the threat of penalties even worse than Grubman's.

Mary Meeker is the exception. She has not been fined, banned, or even asked by her employer, Morgan Stanley To comply with Wikipedia's , the introduction of this article needs a complete rewrite. , to take a paid vacation Noun 1. paid vacation - a vacation from work by an employee with pay granted
holiday, vacation - leisure time away from work devoted to rest or pleasure; "we get two weeks of vacation every summer"; "we took a short holiday in Puerto Rico"
. Eliot Spitzer seems to have abandoned whatever interest he had in mining her career, or in singling out Morgan Stanley for its role in the boom.

And Morgan Stanley's executives have clearly decided to stick by their most famous analyst. At the Morgan Stanley annual meeting, shareholder advocate Evelyn Y. Davis, a character made to order for some Hollywood screenwriter, used Meeker as a club to beat Morgan Stanley Chief Executive Phil Purcell.

Davis pointed out that "a lot of people lost money because of her. She should be fired." But while Purcell wilted beneath other blows from the 73-year-old Davis, he stood right up to her on the subject of Mary Meeker. "We have a very different view of the contribution Mary made," he replied. "She was a pioneer on the Internet. We value her research."

'Wall Street Meat'

It's a curious situation, and it becomes a great deal more curious when you read a deliciously naughty new book called "Wall Street Meat: Jack Grubman, Frank Quattrone, Mary Meeker, Henry Blodget and me."

Its author is a fellow I've known for some time, Andy Kessler. But while I've known him for some time, I had no idea he was writing a book. One dark day the thing just showed up on my desk, and I breathed a heavy sigh -- another goddamn god·damn also God·damn  
interj.
Used to express extreme displeasure, anger, or surprise.

n.
Damn.

tr. & intr.v. god·damned, god·damn·ing, god·damns
To damn.

adj.
 friend had gone and written another goddamn book and I was going to have to at least pretend to read the goddamn thing.

Kessler, a former Wall Street technology analyst, worked with Grubman at Paine Webber Paine Webber and Company was an American stock brokerage firm that was acquired by the Swiss bank UBS AG in 2000. The company was founded in 1880 in Boston, Massachusetts, by William Alfred Paine and Wallace G. Webber.  Group Inc. and Meeker and Quattrone at Morgan Stanley. He finally quit in the 1990s to make a fortune putting money where his mouth was, actually investing in technology companies. He was right there, on the inside. He knew exactly how the Wall Street machine worked.

Having made his fortune, he now seems to feel free to say what he wants about his former firms and old colleagues. What he has to say will not particularly please them, but that is neither here nor there. It will interest the rest of us.

"Wall Street Meat" shows how the essential problem of Wall Street research was - as most people now know - that it ceased to serve investors and began to serve investment bankers. Investors no longer paid the investment banks The following is a list of investment banks Financial conglomerates
Large financial-services conglomerates combine commercial banking and investment banking, and sometimes insurance.
 well enough so that they could afford to produce honest research, and so the investment banks figured out how to use their research to help the corporations that paid them far better. And the investment bank that forged this dubious new model was... Morgan Stanley.

Ignoring the monkeys

At Morgan Stanley, Kessler learns that he will be paid not by the brokers but by the bankers - and that the banker who will make the most difference to him is Frank Quattrone. Quattrone soon would leave Morgan Stanley, but not before he found and created an analyst who, in Kessler's view, was a) desperate to be one of the boys, b) free of useful investment ideas, and c) willing to define her job as the pleasing of corporations that issued securities rather than investors who bought them. That analyst was Mary Meeker.

To Kessler, it seems clear that Meeker was particularly susceptible to her investment bankers because she had nothing interesting to say to her investors. When she turned up at Morgan Stanley, she appeared to Kessler "clueless clue·less  
adj.
Lacking understanding or knowledge.


clueless
Adjective

Slang helpless or stupid

Adj. 1.
." "I could almost hear the calm, comforting words of Frank Quattrone telling Mary not to worry about those nasty guys in sales, because they were just monkeys with phones," he writes. "The path to success at Morgan Stanley was doing deals."

To which he later adds: "Mary Meeker had an analytical crew she could count on to wade through due diligence Research; analysis; your homework. This term has caught on in all industries, because it sounds so "wired." Who would want to do analysis or research when they can do due diligence. See wired.  and analysis of banking clients, but I don't think she ever felt comfortable with her own analysis. The bankers were her filters. Bad move."

There are a lot of theories to explain why Eliot Spitzer let Mary Meeker be. One is that it doesn't pay a politician to beat up women in public. Another is that Morgan Stanley's tech people somehow erased most of their old emails, and so Spitzer was unable to humiliate the firm with its own water cooler chat. Or perhaps Spitzer found nothing to suggest that in promoting the likes of Women.com Networks Inc. and HomeGrocer.com, Meeker ever had anything other than investors' interests at heart.

Regardless of which theory you believe, Kessler makes one thing clear: Morgan Stanley, and Mary Meeker, knew no other way of doing business.

In his view, Morgan Stanley, having no tradition of pleasing investors, and no ability to do so, designed its investment bank without the investor in mind. Meeker and her bosses didn't know enough to have a guilty conscience Noun 1. guilty conscience - remorse caused by feeling responsible for some offense
guilt feelings, guilt trip, guilt

compunction, remorse, self-reproach - a feeling of deep regret (usually for some misdeed)
 when they sold out investors to please corporations. In a game like this, that's a huge advantage.

Michael Lewis Michael Lewis or Mick Lewis may refer to:
  • Michael Lewis (singer-songwriter), a recording artist
  • Michael Lewis (author), a non-fiction author
  • Mick Lewis, an Australian cricketer
  • Michael Lewis (model), Israeli basketball player, actor and fashion model
 is a columnist for Bloomberg News. His book "MoneyBall," about professional baseball, will be published next month.
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Comment:Lack of conscience aided Morgan Stanley. (Commentry).
Author:Lewis, Michael
Publication:Los Angeles Business Journal
Geographic Code:1USA
Date:May 5, 2003
Words:1031
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