Chas. Merrill decided to open a office in NY on 1/6/1914. This was before he pyramided with Lynch and Fenner and Peirce and Smith. It was a nice office right there on 7 Wall Street and made gothamic profits right away. But this was happening in so many offices in the neighborhood because people were putting up money to buy into business like movies and grocery stores and the like. And people were good then. Now fast forward 94 years and instead of making money investing in American enterprise, the brass at the company, now Merrill Lynch, took almost a third of money from the US Treasury TARP bonanza allocated for financial relief and called it executive bonuses which is why we hate Merrill Lynch today and its parent company Bank of America. You could hear the a-holes smirking "Yo, Merrill - we did it because they're letting us get away with it!" All hail the power of slovenly greed and pass the antidote, Sen. Warren.
