Can This CEO and This Firm Save Wall Street ?

Like it or not, Wall Street, your industry has a new visionary: James Gorman, the 51-year-old, Australian-born chief executive officer of Morgan Stanley.

Bloomberg contributor William D Cohan writes:

Yes, other Wall Street bigwigs such as Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs and Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase get more attention. But Gorman stands out because he has chosen the opposite tack of the leaders at other major global financial services companies, who are still hopeful the status quo on Wall Street will be resurrected by the time the rest of the new Dodd- Frank rules and regulations get written next year.

'We are unambiguously business not as usual',  he told the Financial Times last week, 'and have dramatically changed the shape of our firm'.

Indeed he has. Once upon a time - way back in 2008 - Morgan Stanley, under CEO John Mack, was virtually indistinguishable from its archrival Goldman Sachs and was in many of the same lines of business as Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. In less than three years, Gorman has transformed the place.

'This is a firm that had a tiny wealth management business a few years ago', he said, 'had underinvested in fixed-income, had underinvested in infrastructure, ran a hedge fund that was unprofitable. … We had a lot of problems and were doing a lot of swings for the fences in the merchant bank. We’ve cleared all that stuff out'.

Hit the link below to access the complete Bloomberg article:

Can Morgan Stanley’s Gorman Save Wall Street?

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