O’Neal Writedown Erased 20% of Shareholder Equity

These numbers surrounding the losses at Merrill Lynch (MER) are staggering:

The real damage to shareholders came with Merrill’s $8.4 billion writedown. It is the biggest in the history of Wall Street and wiped out four quarters of growth in shareholders’ equity, according to Merrill’s published figures. The charge, mostly for collateralized debt obligations and subprime mortgages, left the New York-based company with $38.8 billion of assets minus liabilities.
Losing “20 percent of shareholders’ equity in one fell swoop is a serious blow,” said Robert Willens, the accounting analyst at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in New York. “It might take them two to three years to earn that capital back.”
The writedown, which has ruined O’Neal’s 21-year career at Merrill, is more than the world’s biggest brokerage earned before taxes from fixed-income sales and trading in the past three years, according to estimates by Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. The decline may weigh on Merrill shares, this year’s second- worst performer among the five biggest U.S. securities firms, because many investors use book value to price the stock.

Posted by on October 30th, 2007 at 10:08 am


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