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Sunday, Bloody Sunday…

By Brian | September 16, 2008 | Share on Facebook

This might be a good time to review my work history:

1991 – graduate college and take a job with the company now known as Accenture.
2000 – begin a two-year stint as an Accenture consultant to Merrill Lynch.
2004 – leave Accenture and join the Lehman Brothers IT department
2006 – leave Lehman Brothers and join the Bank of America Global Markets Back Office IT group

Recognize any of those company names from the news over the past couple of days? To say the least, it’s been an incredible weekend. Things no one ever thought would happen have happened, and have happened in quick succession. For some perspective: Lehman Brothers survived the great depression, but couldn’t make it through the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2008. Explaining why that is true would take pages upon pages of blog posts, as well as a level of understanding that I don’t fully possess. Suffice to say it’s extremely complex, extremely depressing, and (much to the chagrin of the press and politicians in the days and weeks to come) not easily blamed on a given person or group of people.

I’ll leave the Bank of America / Merrill Lynch acquisition alone on the blog, since I’m prohibited from sharing anything I know about it that isn’t already in the press (which, to be honest, isn’t much at this point). But since Ken Lewis and John Thain said publicly this morning that the entire deal (from initial proposal to completion) took about 48 hours, I think I’m free to say this: all of us were shocked. Very few, if any, saw it coming. As an IT professional, that means there’s a whole lot of work ahead to figure out what it really means.

It’s time to roll with the punches, folks…

Topics: Money Talk | 1 Comment »

One Response to “Sunday, Bloody Sunday…”

  1. jason says at September 16th, 2008 at 12:38 pm :
    Hm. So… the lesson here is that I ought to sell off any stock in a company you consult for? :)

    Seriously, this is getting pretty scary, especially given the speed with which the BoA/Merrill Lynch thing went down.