Lewis said largest U.S. bank will have 'fairly significant' job eliminations resulting from its takeover of Merrill Lynch

A good number of those lost jobs will be from the BofA side that are currently in Charlotte. Many of the ML people in NYC will lose their jobs too, but it is not going to all fall on ML and and not all on the NYC business units.

Thain is going to head-up GWM and will be keeping most of the ML people.

waverly..is GWM global wealth management? i.e. the broker for force? what about core fixed income?

"A good number of those lost jobs will be from the BofA side that are currently in Charlotte."

Doubt it. Look at costs. Charlotte = 1/3 Manhatta.

"Thain is going to head-up GWM"

For 6 months.

The only MER people who will be hanging around are the brokers, and they're not here. Everything else is being shipped out.

GWM = Global Wealth Management

Steve - I didn't realize that you sit-in on the discussions with BofA on how they are going to handle the merger!

Charlotte may be cheaper, but a lot of the talent that ML has in NYC is better-suited to the I-Banking business and will be kept in NYC. That doesn't mean there won't be layoffs in NYC, but it does mean that a good number of NYC jobs will be kept. They are keeping the ML name for certain pieces as well.

Hey Steve, Lubbock, TX is cheaper than Charlotte, so maybe they should move everybody there, right? It's not as simple as that, because the complexity of the business requires people with the right skill-set and that unique skill-set for a lot of these jobs is in NYC or in some cases the people in NYC are better than the people in Charlotte for certain jobs. It is not going to all fall on the ML people and a number of the BofA people have already been told this.

"Merrill Lynch confirmed that 6,200 advisors, or about 37 percent of all Merrill financial advisors, signed a retention agreement from new parent company Bank of America by 4 p.m. on Friday. But Merrill says that only about half of the firm's nearly 17,000 advisors were eligible in the first place, and that they are responsible for about 75 percent of the firm's production. Almost 95 percent of these eligible advisors signed. Of the absolute best at the firm—those producing annual revenue of $1.75 billion or more—99 percent signed the agreement."

"Thain will oversee its global banking, securities and wealth management once the acquisition is complete."