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	Blue Blood and Mutiny: The Fight for the Soul of Morgan Stanley By: Beard, Patricia Published By: HarperCollins ePub for Digital Editions Price: $12.99 PDF for Digital Editions Price: $12.99 Mobipocket Reader Price: $12.99 Microsoft Reader Price: $12.99 PDF for Digital EditionsePub for Digital EditionsMobipocket ReaderMicrosoft Reader	EBOOK OPTIONS ADD TO CART ADD TO WISHLIST TELL A FRIEND RECEIVE ALERTS
	The inside story of the power struggle that rocked Wall Street's most prestigious financial institution. What began with a shot over the bow ended in a shocking coup d'etat. In less than four months a group of eight retired executives orchestrated a stunning revolt within Morgan Stanley, the venerable and—until recently—most successful financial services firm on Wall Street. Now acclaimed journalist and historian Patricia Beard brings together the entire behind-the-scenes story in Blue Blood and Mutiny , a real-life business thriller exposing the tale that shook high finance. In March 2005 the business world woke up to an unprecedented full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal calling for the removal of Morgan Stanley's CEO. It was paid for by a cohort of eight former Morgan Stanley executives, including an ex-chairman and an ex-president, who soon would be dubbed the "Eight Grumpy Old Men." Their target was CEO Philip Purcell, a midwesterner who had come to power following Morgan Stanley's 1997 merger with Dean Witter Discover, where Purcell had been chief executive. In his eight years as CEO, Purcell had presided over a 50 percent decline in stock price since its peak in 2000 and a series of high-profile government and civil lawsuits that had tarnished the company's once-sterling reputation. Just a few months after the Journal ad, Purcell would retire under pressure, and former president John Mack, who had been pushed out by Purcell, was appointed CEO. The "Eight Grumpy Old Men" won the battle. The revolt of the Eight is about more than the stock price, or any bottom-line metrics: it signals a clash of cultures and a battle for the soul of American business. Since its founding, Morgan Stanley has been an elite enterprise guided by J. P. Morgan Jr.'s motto "A First Class Business in a First Class Way." The House of Morgan stood for something larger than success with honor; its ethos was unique—some would say sacred—and the eight retired executives believed this ideal had been undermined during Purcell's reign. Opening the long-closed doors of a bastion of Wall Street that has maintained the strictest privacy until now, Blue Blood and Mutiny weaves the history of Morgan Stanley with the inside story of the fight for dominance between two competing business cultures—one, the collegial meritocracy handed down from the days of J. P. Morgan, and the other, a cold, contemporary corporate model. Here is the season's must-read book for anyone who wants to understand the future of American business.

Excerpt

Chapter One

A First Class Business

The "Grumpy Old Men" of the 2005 battle were the Young Turks who came to Morgan Stanley between 1958 and 1976, entering a firm that was hardly bigger than it had been when it was founded in 1935. Those who called the Group of Eight conservative and accused its members of being stuck in the past forgot that the firm had remained preeminent because, while its executives were nimble, creative, and aggressive, they also kept certain underlying values alive. Chief among those were the emphasis on meritocracy, ethics, and an inclusive, debate-driven partnership.

As late as 1970, Morgan Stanley had only 34 general partners, 4 limited partners, and 165 employees, of whom 65 were professionals. It was meagerly capitalized—in 1964, former chairman Perry E. Hall declared that he didn't see the need for more than $10 million in capital. The business was dominated by "relationship banking," underwriting equity and debt for the blue chip companies of smokestack America. Its clients were so loyal that competitors didn't even try to solicit their business.

When the time came for the new, post–World War II generation to shake things up, it would take courage, strategic intelligence, and a willingness to smash icons to move forward without losing the firm's real capital: its name and all it had represented in the American and European financial markets for nearly one hundred years.

The first Morgan financier was Junius Morgan, a London-based American, who emerged as an international banker in the mid-nineteenth century. His most stunning accomplishment was to organize a 250-million-franc ($50 million) loan to the French during the Franco-Prussian War, an amount few bankers anywhere in the world could raise at that time. Yet despite an enormously successful career, he operated in an era when the United States was still a debtor, not a creditor nation, and the Industrial Revolution was yet to hit its peak. Junius would be overshadowed in the history of business and the development of nations by his only surviving son, J. Pierpont Morgan, who began his career when the great opportunities were American and industrial.

J. P. Morgan established himself in New York in 1857, founded the company that bore his name, and focusing on "industrial architecture on the Jurassic scale," he set the pattern for the enormous corporations that dominated global industry. When Morgan Stanley was founded in 1935, many of the great trusts and mergers J. P. Morgan put together—steel, farm equipment, railroads, communications—would become Morgan Stanley clients.

Morgan Stanley was born during the Great Depression, not because that was a propitious time to start a new business, but because the Senate Banking and Currency Committee hearings on Wall Street practices challenged the primacy of the great private banks, and the Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933 required them to separate their commercial and investment banking businesses.

In the early 1930s there weren't many companies that were looking to refinance, and J. P. Morgan & Co. decided to keep its commercial business and close down investment banking. Two years later, when interest rates were low and the economic climate was more favorable, a small group of J. P. Morgan partners got together to form a new firm, Morgan Stanley, to handle its clients' investment banking needs.

Morgan Stanley's first, and for many years its biggest, client was AT&T, a J. P. Morgan legacy; in 1906 Morgan had been part of a group that co-underwrote a $100 million bond issue to refinance American Telephone and Telegraph. From that time onward, J. P. Morgan was AT&T's principal banker, and when Morgan Stanley took over the investment banking functions, AT&T was a significant influence in the decision to found the new firm. Between 1936 and 1968 Morgan Stanley issued $4.85 billion of securities for AT&T.

Morgan's most famous trust, created in 1901, was United States Steel, the world's first billion-dollar corporation. A merger of small and large steel companies, it was capitalized at $1.4 billion, more than 15 percent of the total market cap of all American manufacturing companies. Between 1938 and 1961, Morgan Stanley would issue more than $1 billion in equity and debt for U.S. Steel. In 1902, Morgan organized another great merger, creating International Harvester, which controlled 85 percent of the U.S. farm equipment business. In 1954, when International Harvester wanted to issue $34 million in secondary offerings of preferred and common stock, it brought the deal to Morgan Stanley. One of the oldest associations was with General Electric: J. P. Morgan's Philadelphia affiliate, Drexel Morgan, underwrote the first bond offering for the newly formed General Electric Company in 1892, and J. P. Morgan himself joined the GE board. In 1956, Morgan Stanley issued $300 million in GE debentures.

While Morgan Stanley inherited and then earned the respect and trust of industrial America, the firm was also bequeathed the responsibility and public attention that went with a great name. At a time when the United States had no central bank, the Morgans came to the rescue in times of economic crisis, earning the firm and its principals the awe and, often, the distrust of the general public.

The Morgans' most effective public interventions were the most controversial. In 1895, when U.S. gold reserves fell to $68 million, and the government vaults on Wall Street held only $9 million in gold, a $10 million draft against the gold was in the offing. J. P. Morgan traveled to Washington in a blizzard to meet with President Grover Cleveland, and as Morgan ner-vous-ly crumbled his cigar, he proposed to lead a syndicate in partnership with the Rothschilds to raise $65 billion in gold bonds. The Morgan and Rothschild interests secured the bonds with a reserve of 3.5 million ounces of gold, which they assembled and held, stabilizing the price and the supply. The issue sold out, and J. P. Morgan turned a profit: the bonds were issued at 104½ but traded between 112¾ and 119, with the . . .

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