Merrill Lynch and Co. was formed back in 1914 as a small investment firm on Wall Street, but over time grew into one of the largest firms in the world. In 1971 the company went public and at the time they were managing over 1.7 trillion dollars in assets. However come 2007 and the financial crisis Merrill Lynch and Co found themselves only days away from declaring bankruptcy. Bank of America Corporation is an American multinational banking and financial services corporation, is the largest bank holding company in the United States by assets, and the second largest bank by market capitalization (Top 50 bank, 2011). At the same time Merrill Lynch and Co was having trouble with consecutive multi-billion dollar loss quarters, Bank of America was in talks with Lehman Brothers about a possible acquisition. However the government could not make any guarantees to Bank of America for funding so talks died down in the last hours. Thus setting up what many professionals in the financial sector deem as the “Deal from Hell”. The exact cause of the downfall of one of the largest financial institutions in the world is up for debate among professionals from that field. According to some the collapse of Merrill Lynch started earlier in the years of 2006-2007 and can be widely attributed to then CEO Stanley O’Neal. According to Barry Grey, “The 93-year-old firm announced it had lost over $2.2 billion in the third quarter and written off $8.4 billion in failed investments, of which $7.9 was due to the downward valuation of highly speculative securities linked to subprime mortgage debt” (Grey, 2007). Reportedly the write off was equivalent to 13 percent of the value of the firm’s total shares in the stock market, as well as surpassed their 2006 net earnings and was equal to 42 percent of their gross revenue for the first nine months of 2007. In the spring of that year stocks were