Ex Merrill star hired by Morgan Stanley’s Gorman
MORGAN Stanley said yesterday it had hired former Merrill Lynch president and chief operating officer Gregory Fleming to run its investment management group.
Fleming — one of the architects of Merrill Lynch’s sale to Bank of America — will be president of Morgan Stanley Investment Management. He will also be responsible for Morgan Stanley’s global research and will report to incoming chief executive James Gorman.
Fleming left Bank of America after the deal closed in January and has been working as a senior research scholar at Yale University. He has been portrayed as a key proponent of the sale of Merrill Lynch at the height of last year’s financial crisis despite initial reluctance from then-Merrill CEO John Thain. In Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book Too Big to Fail, Fleming was credited with getting Bank of America to agree to pay substantial bonuses for Merrill bankers.