Merrill Lynch brought on Michael Nierenberg from JPMorgan Chase & Co. to spearhead its global-mortgages and securitized-products division, Lynch's most recent plan to recover from swelling mortgage losses. Lynch also invited James DeMare, coming over from Citigroup Inc., to join its firm and run its mortgage trading operations.
Such bold moves by Merrill Lynch showed a competitive edge, proving to clientele the firm is aggressive enough to hire on executives from rival firms as opposed to simply promoting from within.
As Nierenberg and DeMare join the Merrill Lynch team, they will not be directly succeeding any one particular person; however the positions they are filling aren't new to the company. Danielle Robinson, a spokeswoman for Merrill Lynch, said the duties that now fall on the shoulders of Mr. Nierenberg and Mr. DeMare were previously distributed on a temporary basis among other bankers within the firm. The hope of the firm is to have those responsibilities now be a permanent focus.
Thomas K. Montag, Lynch's head of global sales and trading, spoke highly of Mike Nierenberg and James DeMare saying "both Mike and Jim are among the most highly skilled and knowledgeable people in the mortgage business".
Before coming to Merrill Lynch, Nierenberg acted as head of global securitized products at JPMorgan subsequent to its takeover of Bear Stearns earlier this year. Prior to that, "he held a number of positions at Bear Stearns, where he served since 1994, including head of interest rate and foreign exchange trading operations, co-head of structured products and co-head of mortgage-backed securities trading" according to CNNMoney.com.
DeMare was with Citigroup for 11 years prior to joining the Merrill firm where he was the global head of mortgage trading; in that position Mr. DeMare oversaw the trading of all securitized products in the firm's fixed-income currencies and commodities group.
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