Brad Hintz Business Quotations

This is a business of reputation, and when chief executives are making M&A decisions that could affect their own career paths, they don't want to take a chance.

We are probably at the point where the trading cycle is slowing, at least in North America, and it's tough to say investment banking will get better. But the retail and asset management businesses look really good. That's what's exciting to investors.

What it really says is the future of institutional equities will be more like fixed income - a business of proprietary trading and customer execution with customers evolving away form being a client and acting more like a counterparty, ... This idea of a fixed income model for equity - taking risk - seems to be working, he said.

Merchant banking remains an exceptional business for the handful of Wall Street firms that have remained in it. Unfortunately, the disclosure of merchant banking portfolio positions is weak, and forecasting these gains is at best challenging.

This seems to be a case of Mack wanting to put his own team together, ... Stepping back, we'll have to wait and see if Mack is only targeting heads of troubled business units or former Dean Witter people or if he's in the process of gathering an entirely new team. Only time will tell.