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Comment by yumraj | Hacker News Reader

What's the movement from Bear Sterns to Merrill Lynch imply? It's the only one linking two failed entities..

Merrill Lynch still sort of exists, in the sense that people will still say they work there. They have officially rebranded to "Bank of America Merrill Lynch", but I imagine people that were originally hired by ML will still say they work for ML and keep their LinkedIn profiles updated accordingly. (I'm on the other side, and I tell people I work for the Bank of America rather than "Bank of America Merrill Lynch", because that's a mouthful, and frankly, not a very creative name.)

I'm not sure if this is correct - the only bits that kept the ML brand were the private wealth management and some parts of the non-US global markets division. Even then, officially the full name is still "Bank of America Merrill Lynch" and I think only a minority would keep their employer listed as "Merrill Lynch".

Merrill Lynch was not bought by BoA until September 2008 and the merger did not legally complete until December of the same year (followed by company-wide rebranding throughout 2009). So I think the flow on the graph shows those that were made redundant when Bear Stearns collapsed in March 2008 and then went on to employment with ML before the BoA merger, which happened nine months later.

EDIT: grammar.

FWIW, our email addresses did not change from "bankofamerica.com" to "baml.com"† until two weeks ago. If I used LinkedIn, this is the event that would prompt me to update my profile, rather than whatever press releases were issued.

(† Why yes, we do use YAML...)

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