Deals & People January 13, 2009

Merrill’s Bull to Stick Around After BoA Acquisition

Unlike some of the Merrill Lynch advisers and senior management, the company’s bull logo will remain.
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Bank of America issued a memo today, in which it announced that Merrill Lynch & Co.’s bull logo will be a symbol of the combined Bank of America and Merrill Lynch financial advisory business, called Merrill Lynch Wealth Management.

The corporate, commercial, investment banking, and capital markets businesses, however, will be branded “Bank of America Merrill Lynch” and will use Bank of America’s “flagscape” logo.

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The memo also said the names of U.S. Trust, a private wealth management unit for high net worth clients, and the mutual fund unit Columbia Management will remain.

The logo announcement comes shortly after the acquisition was finalized and the week after two high-ranking Merrill executives departed. Robert McCann, the vice chairman of the wealth management division at Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc., resigned and was replaced by Dan Sontag, a deputy who oversees Merrill’s brokerage operations in the U.S. and Latin America, reports said (see “McCann Exits Merrill after Bank of America Takeover’). Later in the week, it was announced that Gregory Fleming, former president and chief operating officer of Merrill Lynch & Co., left Bank of America to join Yale Law School’s faculty (see “BoA Loses another Ex-Merrill Exec’).

Data & Research January 13, 2009

Education Level Influences Plan Participation

The October 2008 Issue Brief from the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) indicates that workers with lower educational attainment have lower levels of retirement plan participation.
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The Issue Brief examines the level of participation by workers in public- and private-sector employment-based pension or retirement plans, based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s March 2008 Current Population Survey (CPS), the most recent data available.

The analysis found that workers with the least education (no high school diploma) had significantly lower levels of retirement plan participation than those with at least a high school diploma. Specifically, 50.7% of those without a high school diploma and making $50,000 or more participated in a retirement plan, compared with 65% of those with the same earnings and only a high school diploma and 76.1% of those with a graduate or professional degree.

EBRI notes that educational attainment also has a strong correlation with earnings; however, when controlling for earnings, the most highly educated workers still had the highest levels of participation in a retirement plan.

For workers ages 21 to 64 with annual earnings from $15,000 to $29,999:

  • No high school diploma: 17.8% participate in a retirement plan.
  • High school diploma: 33.3% participate.
  • Some college: 37.9% participate.
  • Bachelor’s degree: 40.8% participate.
  • Graduate/professional degree: 39.5% participate.

Meanwhile, for workers 21 to 64 with annual earnings from $30,000 to $49,999:

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  • No high school diploma: 36.1% participate in a retirement plan.
  • High school diploma: 54.7% participate.
  • Some college: 58.8% participate.
  • Bachelor’s degree: 63% participate.
  • Graduate/professional degree: 69% participate.

The Issue Brief is here.

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