Divorce - Bank of America Style (Excerpt)
Fortune - January 30, 2009
by Shawn Tully

"There’s no doubt that Thain bears a lot of responsibility for Merrill’s recent woes. (Thain would not comment for this story.) He oversaw trading directly for more than half his term at Merrill, until he hired Thomas Montag who now runs sales and trading for the combined bank. “His excuse that all the risky trades were ‘legacy positions’ left over from his predecessors is absurd,” says Janet Tavakoli of Tavakoli Structured Finance, a capital markets consulting firm. “He was CEO for a year, so he should have sold off those positions. They were his legacy positions!”


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Janet Tavakoli is the president of Tavakoli Structured Finance, a Chicago-based firm that provides consulting to financial institutions and institutional investors. Ms. Tavakoli has more than 20 years of experience in senior investment banking positions, trading, structuring and marketing structured financial products. She is a former adjunct professor of derivatives at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. She is the author of: Credit Derivatives & Synthetic Structures (John Wiley & Sons, 1998, 2001), Structured Finance & Collateralized Debt Obligations (John Wiley & Sons, 2008), and
Dear Mr. Buffett: What An Investor Learns 1,269 Miles From Wall Street (John Wiley & Sons January 2009)

Clients of Tavakoli Structured Finance have the benefit of proprietary consultation, which is not available in any other paid or public forum. Clients also commission proprietary research and analysis.

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