He served as CEO of Credit Suisse First Boston before returning to Morgan Stanley as chief executive in 2005.
He was known affectionately — and, often, not so affectionately — as “Mack the Knife,” allegedly for his penchant for cost cutting. Others say the nickname came from his sometimes blood-thirsty approach to trading. One colorful tale — that may even be true — from the 1980s has him screaming over the trading floor, “There’s blood in the water. Let’s go kill!”
One of the funnier nicknames I heard a Morgan Stanley guy use was “Lady Mackbeth”—for Shakespeare’s lethal woman who always had blood on her hands.
Mack became one of the defining characters of Wall Street through the past few decades. We’ll raise a glass to him…and maybe even try to sneak into the “Open Forum.”
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