29 Facts About Merrill Lynch

Merrill, previously branded Merrill Lynch, is an American investment management and wealth management division of Bank of America.

Merrill Lynch rose to prominence on the strength of its network of financial advisors, sometimes referred to as the "thundering herd", that allowed it to place securities it underwrote directly.

Charles Merrill received a minority interest in E A Pierce in the transaction.

Merrill Lynch became the first on Wall Street to publish an annual fiscal report in 1941.

On December 31,1957, The New York Times referred to that name as "a sonorous bit of Americana" and said, "After sixteen years of popularizing [it], Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, and Beane is going to change it—and thereby honor the man who has been largely responsible for making the name of a brokerage house part of an American saga, " Winthrop H Smith, who had been running the company since 1940.

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The Government Securities business brought Merrill Lynch the needed leverage to establish many of the unique money market products and government bond mutual fund products, responsible for much of the firm's growth in the 1970s and 1980s.

In June 1998, Merrill Lynch re-entered the Canadian investment business with its purchase of Midland Walwyn Inc At the time, Canada was the seventh-largest market for personal investment.

In 2003, Merrill Lynch became the second-largest shareholder of Japanese animation studio TMS Entertainment.

Merrill Lynch purchased the stake purely for investment purposes and had no intention of acquiring control of the firm's management.

In mid-2008, Merrill Lynch sold a group of CDOs that had once been valued at $30.

MBIA claimed, among other things, that Merrill Lynch defrauded MBIA about the quality of these CDOs, and that it was using the complicated nature of these particular CDOs to hide the problems it knew about in the securities that the CDOs were based on.

Rabobank later claimed that its case against Merrill Lynch was very similar to the SEC's fraud charges against Goldman Sachs and its Abacaus CDOs.

Merrill Lynch disputed the arguments of Rabobank, with a spokesman claiming "The two matters are unrelated and the claims today are not only unfounded but weren't included in the Rabobank lawsuit filed nearly a year ago".

In March 2009, it was reported that in 2008, Merrill Lynch received billions of dollars from its insurance arrangements with AIG, including $6.

In 1998, Merrill Lynch paid Orange County, California $400 million to settle accusations that it sold inappropriate and risky investments to former county treasurer Robert Citron.

The county sued a dozen or more securities companies, advisors and accountants, but Merrill Lynch settled without admitting liability, paying $400 million of a total $600 million recovered by the county.

In 2002, Merrill Lynch agreed to pay out $100 million for publishing misleading research.

Between 1999 and 2001, during the dot-com bubble, Henry Blodget, a well-known analyst at Merrill Lynch, gave assessments about stocks in private emails that conflicted with what he publicly published via Merrill.

Merrill Lynch settled without admitting or denying the allegations and was barred from the securities industry for life.

In 2004, convictions of Merrill Lynch executives marked the only instance in the Enron investigation where the government criminally charged any officials from the banks and securities firms that allegedly helped Enron execute its accounting scandals.

The charges alleged that the 1999 sale of an interest in Nigerian power barge by an Enron entity to Merrill Lynch was a sham that allowed Enron to illegally book about $12 million in pretax profit, when in fact there was no real sale and no real profit.

Merrill Lynch reached its own settlement, firing bankers and agreeing to the outside oversight of its structured-finance transactions.

On June 26,2007, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission brought suit against Merrill Lynch, alleging the firm discriminated against Dr Majid Borumand because of his Iranian nationality and Islamic religion, with "reckless disregard" for his protected civil rights.

Merrill Lynch was criticized by both the National Iranian American Council, and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

In March 2005, Merrill Lynch paid a $10 million civil penalty to settle allegations of improper activities at the firm's Fort Lee, New Jersey office.

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Merrill Lynch failed to reasonably supervise these financial advisers, whose market timing siphoned short-term profits out of mutual funds and harmed long-term investors.

Merrill Lynch admitted wrongdoing and agreed to pay a $42 million penalty.

On 22 March 2019, Merrill Lynch agreed to pay more than $8 million to settle charges of improper handling of pre-released American depositary receipts under investigation of the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Merrill Lynch neither admitted nor denied the investigation findings but agreed to pay disgorgement of more than $4.