With Bank of America Corp. acquiring Merrill Lynch & Co. on Monday for $50 billion in stock, three unnamed Merrill directors will join BofA's board. No role was announced for Merrill chairman and CEO John Thain (pictured). By adding Merrill Lynch's more than 16,000 financial advisers, BofA would have the largest brokerage in the world with more than 20,000 advisers, making it the ninth-largest adviser on global mergers and acquisitions.
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Merrill has been beefing up its ranks of late, most recently hiring Wall Street veteran George "Woody" Young III as global head of technology, media and telecommunications investment banking, based in New York. Young arrived after his noncompetition clause with Lehman Brothers Inc. expired. Young left Lehman in March 2007, where he was head of the global communications group. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, although none of the broker-dealer subsidiaries or other subsidiaries of LBHI were included in the filing.
A week before adding Young, Merrill hired Michael Nierenberg from J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. to head the global mortgages and securitized products businesses, and James De Mare from Citigroup Inc. was added to run the company's mortgage trading operations. - Baz Hiralal
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I hope this crisis soon come to a halt.