The people familiar with the matter have spoken once more, which can only mean one thing: another Wall Street chief is headed for the executioners block. The Wall Street Journal's Kate Kelly is reporting that Jimmy Cayne has started notifying to board Bear Stearns that he plans to give up the CEO desk while remaining chairman. Alan Schwartz is expected take over.

More tomorrow morning.

Bear CEO Expected to Step Down But Remain in Chairman Post [Wall Street Journal]

developing...

And we’re back to Thain already.

Not that there was any doubt but it’s now official. Here’s the Merrill Lynch press release announcing that Thain takes the helm on December 1st.

"Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc. (NYSE: MER) today announced that John A. Thain, chief executive officer, director and member of Management Committee of NYSE Euronext, Inc. and former president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs Group, has been appointed chairman and chief executive officer of Merrill Lynch, effective December 1," Merrill said in a statement.

Full Press Release after the jump.

Red Sox Win!: They're shipping up to Boston with the World Series trophy. Our friend Will Leitch at Deadspin said it best: "The Rockies did the best they could to make a game, or a series, out of it, but it just wasn't happening: The Boston Red Sox were not to be denied." We're not going anywhere Professor Thom's tonight but congratulations to all our lads and lasses up in the New York City embassy of Red Sox nation. (10.29.07)

Portfolio: The connection between the news media and back-room power-plays. (10.28.07)

[Editor's note: It is 7:55. And that's probably our last update for a while. Time to see if Colorado gets swept. Assuming the bartender at our local pub doesn't over-serve us, we'll check back in after the game. In the meantime, feel free to leave any updates in the comments section below or email us at tips@dealbreaker.com. If nothing new develops from the Merrill board tonight (which seems likely given the hour), we'll see you back here tomorrow morning. ]

CNBC: Merrill's board considered offering Stan O'Neal the position of interim CEO while they choose a permanent director. Sources close to the situation initially said that a member of the Merrill board would be named interim chairman. (10.28.07)

Bloomberg: The pile-on begins! Daniel Tully, who ran Merrill Lynch in the 1990s, calls firm's third-quarter losses "sickening."

WSJ: Stan has "decided to leave," according to familiar people! (10.28.07)

CNBC: Stan O'Neal "has been ousted as chairman and chief executive officer of Merrill Lynch that much is certain," reports Charlie Gasparino. (10.28.07)

Reuters: Blackrock boss Larry Fink says he's unaware that he's a candidate for the top spot at Merrill Lynch. That would make him the only one who is unaware. (10.28.07)

NYT: The Merrill board has reached a broad consensus that Stan will go, according to people briefed on the discussions. (10.28.07)

IHT: The price-tag of ousting O'Neal: $159 million. (10.28.07)

WSJ: O'Neal is expected to step down, according to someone familiar with the firm's plans. (10.27.07)

CEOs of the world, unite! Forget that CEOs make 364 times more than the average worker (not including perks and benefits) - the average PE and hedge fund manager makes 61 times that of the average CEO.

Side rant regarding sub-workers: The study, conducted by the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy (IPS / UFE), factors in part-time jobs to the average worker salary. If you take the average for a full-time non-managerial job (40k), CEO pay is a mere 270 times the average worker. It’s good to know a fairer society is only a few theoretical adjustments away.

Don’t get your guillotine mobs in a bunch though, CEOs have toned it down, from the lavish 525 times the average worker salary they made in 2000 (that was the record). Forget the fact that in 1989 CEOs made only 71 times the salary of the average worker (Reagan just paved the way for that socialist Bush). Seriously, forget it. Sleep tight knowing that people who make $40k are only imaginary, like the borough of Brooklyn, or the strange creatures adorning the cover of Barbara Ehrenreich’s diary (those aren’t unicorns).

The real story is that CEOs are being forced into exploitative contracts, lulled by the false consciousness of 5 and 44. Sure, the common worker can get coerced into an oppressive labor agreement because he needs a common wage to survive, but CEOs need a robust portfolio of high-yielding alternative investments to survive as well, at the country club. CEOs have never felt as inadequate as members of the Second Estate, partly because PE/Hedge fund managers have several more estates.

CEO pay: 364 times more than workers [CNN Money]

Richard Fairbanks, the CEO, chairman, co-founder, and starting center of Capital One likens his business to a hockey game, because bad baseball metaphors are played out in his opinion. Fairbanks lives and breathes hockey. He co-owns the Washington Capitals, is a member of a full-contact rec team, coaches youth teams and drives a Zamboni to work. He lives by what he calls the Gretzky Concept, which is “go where the puck is going instead of where it is.” Unfortunately, Gretzky’s head is bleeding profusely, through a culmination of industry factors and a hat trick of bad decisions made by Fairbanks.

Fairbanks’ first goal in this hat trick was grabbing Southern consumer bank Hibernia for $4.9bn right before Katrina. The second was acquiring Northeastern commercial bank North Fork for $14.6bn right before the subprime fallout. What really got the hats on the ice was Fairbanks’ belief that he could integrate two major regional bank acquisitions in such a short period of time and face-off against established retail banking giants while battling a flat yield curve. Most North Fork branches have not been rebranded and still are not in Capital One’s central computer system. Apparently Fairbanks reads from the same bad expansion/integration playbook as retail banking giant JPMorgan, and makes equally awkward two line passes.

Last month, Fairbanks tried to mix up his lines, announcing Capital One’s first major cost cutting effort after two and half years of the company’s stock price being stuck in the neutral zone trap. The trap held.

Now, Capital One is trying to find its mojo by playing the management shuffle game, taking execs from Wachovia and Bank of America to replace the head of North Fork and commercial banking. Fairbanks commented, “We really are in the early third period of a three period game when it comes to completing my banking master plan…ok, fine, the seventh inning. We’re in the freaking seventh inning.”

Chief of Capital One Applies Hockey Strategies to Banking [New York Times]

[click to enlarge]

Qwest said this morning that chief exeuctive and board chairman Richard Notebaert plans to step down as soon as a successor is found.

Eddie Lampert may be betting that former US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin is poised to take over as chief of Citigroup, according to a former colleague of both Lampert and Rubin. Earlier this week, Lampert’s ESL Investments disclosed that it had accumulated a 0.3% stake in Citi, setting off speculation about Lampert’s intentions. Speculation ranged from notion that Lampert might view Citigroup as cheap relative to it’s banking peers—this came from an unnamed banker who happens to work at Citigroup—to the idea that he might be poised to take an “activist investor” stance and agitate for change. Shares of Citigroup role 4% following the disclosure of ESL’s position.

“Lampert is tight with Rubin. He loves the man. Idolizes him. He may think that Rubin’s about to become a lot more involved at Citigroup, maybe even to take over for Prince,” the source said, referring to Citigroup chief executive Chuck Prince.

Rubin rose to Wall Street at Goldman Sachs before being appointed to the Treasury position by Bill Clinton. He is now the chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee. Early in his career Lampert worked under Rubin when he was an arbitrage trader at Goldman Sachs. This morning’s Wall Street Journal described Rubin as one of Lampert’s “leading role models.”

Yesterday CNBC’s Charlie Gasparino said that there was pressure for Rubin to take a more active role in the management of Citigroup. His position at the head of the executive committee brings him a hefty paycheck—reportedly $17 million—but some have said he doesn’t exercise much responsibility for the management of the bank. At least one banker employed at an investment bank described Rubin as “a relationship guy” whose job mainly involved using the connections he has made during his long career in finance and government to win business for the bank.

Prince’s tenure at the top of Citigroup has not been a happy one. The bank has been under-pressure from investors to change its management and some have even suggested that it spin off some of its constituent businesses. Prince is widely seen as unwilling to fundamentally change the structure of Citigroup.

Will Chorus Grow at Citi? [Wall Street Journal]

Sunday was a banner day for executive compensation. Make that a banner headline day. The business section of the Sunday New York Times was largely devoted to articles decryingreporting on executive compensation, including reporter Eric Dash’s long, splashy article on executive exit compensation. Now they’ve assembled an online version of the special section with over two dozen pieces on executive comp.

So what’s inspired all this? Well, for that we turn to a Wall Street Journal editorial from a few weeks ago which explained that the SEC’s new disclosure rules for compensation have brought us far more information, inviting exactly this kind of media attention. Unfortunately, the rules produce information which is somewhat misleading, a fact that the New York Times notes, although it doesn’t let this get in the way of reporting the scandal that executives get paid a lot! The most important thing the Journal editorial notes is that the new disclosure rules are particularly bad at revealing whether executive's are getting paid for performance.

Proxy season is under way, and as companies file their annual reports we can expect a spate of "analysis" stories purporting to tell us just how much America's top executives are making. These stories will also purport to demonstrate that there is no pay for performance at the top of publicly traded companies by comparing stock appreciation with the pay as disclosed under a new SEC rule.

These stories will be wrong. This is so for the simple reason that the SEC's new standard is not designed to measure pay-for-performance.

Caveats aside, the niftiest function of the special section tries to address the very question that the Journal warns us about: executive pay for performance. Interestingly, however, it seems to undermine the hypothesis that executive pay is a scandal. It’s an interactive graphic that allows readers to compare company performance to executive pay along a couple of different axes. What’s clear from the graph is that, for the most part, improvements in executive pay seem pretty well correlated with company performance. (But keep in mind that measuring CEO performance over just one year is not necessarily fair or reflective of shareholder interests). Go ahead and play yourself!

Executive Pay [New York Times Special Section]

Earlier today we mentioned Graef Crystal’s column speculating about why the pay packages of Wall Street’s chief executives were so similar despite notable differences in the size of the institutions they manage. Crystal’s question is fair, especially since CEO pay largely tracks that of the firms they manage. Why should this pattern break down on Wall Street?

Crystal posits a couple of image—the smoky backroom, the circled wagons—none of which are very flattering to our leading financial institutions. His idea is that there is safety in numbers—if they all pay around the same thing to the top guys, who’s going to complain?

That’s not such a bad answer, really. And may well explain some of the psychology of the compensation committees. But it is, of course, just speculation. And it’s not clear that this is the only explanation available, or the most obvious.

In fact, if you understand why CEO pay is positively correlated with firm size you can quickly grasp why this doesn’t work out so well on Wall Street. In the broader corporate America, CEOs of larger companies are paid more not because there is some metaphysical connection between the size of a company and the size of a paycheck but because the biggest companies are in fierce competition to attract the top talent. Whether or not CEOs really are what make or break companies, the boards of directors of American companies believe this is true and are willing to pay up for this belief.

Which brings us to Wall Street, where the competition is fierce to hire top CEOs across the range of firm sizes and faith in the leadership principle is stronger than ever. Bear Stearns might be playing catch-up with the larger Lehman Brothers but the two banks are still competitors. Just because Bear Stearns is smaller doesn’t mean it can afford to hire a second-rate CEO on the cheap. The size-comp relationship breaks down on Wall Street, in other words, because the little guys need to constantly worry that the big guys will poach their executives.

There are big fish on Wall Street, and there are bigger fish. But they’re all swimming in the same pond, and to catch them you’ve got to use the same bait. And around here we have a word for the special bait used: it’s called “money.”

Earlier:
What Are They Smoking? The Wall Street Executive Pay Problem [DealBreaker.com]

The pay packages for Wall Street’s highest executives is coming under a new sort of scrutiny. This time what seems to have attracted attention is not so much the huge amounts of money the chief executives received by chief executives of investments banks—but the strange similarity in the pay packages. We noticed this a couple of days ago when Bloomberg’s otherwise measured reporting on the compensation of Bear Stearns chief executive James Cayne—who was reportedly paid $40 million for last year—was interrupted by a not-so-subtle implication that there was something odd about the fact that so many of the guys running Wall Street’s banking firms took in similarly sized pay packages despite the variety in the size of the firms. Why does the head of Bear Stearns get paid as much as the head of, say, Lehman Brothers?

Today Bloomberg columnist Graef Crystal drops the “subtle” and “implication” part and comes right out and says that he thinks there is something fishy going on. "Is Goldman, Lehman Pay Set in Smoke-Filled Room?" his column asks.

So why, when there is so much disparity in sales and net Income, is there so little difference in pay? Is it just coincidence? Possibly. Although total pay packages have become more and more similar, there is still some healthy variation in different forms of pay, such as base salaries and annual bonuses, as well as free stock and option awards.

I have an alternative theory that takes its page from the Old West: circle the wagons. If you're going to pay more than any other industry and by a substantial margin, it helps if you can justify your compensation by holding up the numbers of your industry peers.

So is it a smoke-filled room? Circled wagons? Is the fix in? Or is there perhaps less than meets the eye? More on this later today. It's way too early in the morning to start talking about wage curves and positive correlations.

Is Goldman, Lehman Pay Set in Smoke-Filled Room? [Bloomberg]

Even when it comes the chief executives.

From today’s Wall Street Journal editorial page:

Watson Wyatt Worldwide has been tracking trends in executive pay for years. What it has found is that a CEO's pay tracks a company's three-year performance pretty closely.

Thus, a company that offered its CEO a pay package in the middle of its peer group and had middling performance over the next three years ended up putting an average amount of money in its CEO's pocket. Companies that outperformed over those three years ended up with richer CEOs than comparable companies that underperformed, regardless of whether the pay package at the outset was low, medium or high relative to its peers.

Some companies do overpay. And Watson Wyatt's Ira Kay acknowledges that the Lake Wobegon Syndrome is present in some board rooms: Few directors want an "average" CEO, so they pay above the average for their group. While overpaying may not be optimal for shareholders, even "overpaid" CEOs, according to Watson Wyatt's research, do better when their companies do better. Which we thought was the idea.

Unfortunately, the editorial page goes on to warn, you won’t see any of this in the upcoming disclosures under the new SEC rules for executive compensation. And so we should all get ready for the outrage of the business columnists, which will of course be backed by graphs, charts and human interest stories about folks who cannot retire because they invested their life savings in an underperforming company whose CEO smokes cigars wrapped in thousand dollar bills on the thighs of America’s Next Top Model.

CEOs and Their Millions [Wall Street Journal]

Chuck Prince—who helms the good ship Citigroup as it continues to narrowly avoid wreckage on hazards called Demand for Break-Up, Stock Underperforming, Expenses Outrage, Unsatisfied Arabs and Maria Bartiromo—took in nearly $26 million dollars this year.

That's modest compared to some of his Wall Street peers but then Citigroup's stock performance has been pretty modest too.

What's most interesting is the rumor we heard today from a completely unreliable source. We mean that. Completely unreliable. But still entertaining and that's why we still read his emails.

At that lunch at Four Seasons a couple of weeks ago, Sandy Weill told Chuck Prince that the true measure of success in the finance world is having a working fireplace in your office, according to our source (who, we repeat, has no discernable way of learning such things). This struck us as far fetched until we asked around.

And at least this much is true: way back when he kept an office on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center, Sandy Weill had a working fireplace in his office. We're not sure what this symbolizes about the guy who built Citigroup—and we're pretty sure that the Prince and Weill conversation did not involve the fireplace at all—but surely it symbolizes something. A working fireplace in the World Trade Center? Talk about symbolic, meaningless, wasteful acquisitions.

For Citigroup’s C.E.O., It Was a Very Good Year [New York Times]

So now we know how much it costs to buy off the chief executive of American Express—$10 million. That's the compensation package for incoming Citigroup chief financial officer Gary Crittenden disclosed today in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That's about twice what he was making as chief financial officer of American Express.

But is it enough? Some people in the banking industry we spoke to today have their doubts. They wonder if Crittenden could have been enticed to leave his job at American Express, where he has a long history and a loyal base that might have eventually boosted him up to the chief executive slot, for the disclosed compensation package. So was he offered or promised more?

Now, by way of background, Citigroup has a history of luring top executives away from their companies to work under the Citi umbrella. (And, yes, we know that metaphor doesn't work any more. Just try to keep up.) Before Crittenden there was Sanford Bernstein chief executive Sallie Krawcheck, who was hired on by then-CEO Sandy Weill to clean up a scandal-wracked brokerage division. She went on to become chief financial officer before returning to the brokerage after the latest scandal-tinged reshuffling at Citi saw Todd Thomson, a former chief financial officer and head of the brokerage unit, leave under a cloud of lavish spending and inappropriate use of a corporate jet to transport CNBC stewardesss anchor Maria Bartiromo around the world.

So maybe it's just so sweet working for Citi that any executive would jump at the chance. But doubts persist (notice the weasely passive tense there we use to conceal that the doubters are us and some folks we talk to) that Crittenden would leave AmEx for the chance to work for Chuck Prince. After all, Chuck isn't exactly a legend like Weill, and being the chief financial officer of Citigroup isn't exactly like being put in charge of cleaning house after a serious financial scandal. Rumors had it that the job was so awful—and the details of the awfulness were never clear but we can guess that boring, thankless and Sarbanes-Oxley were a part of it—that Sallie Krawcheck was practically jumping out of her skin to get back to the brokerage.

But what could they have offered Crittenden? A source who has never worked at Citigroup and therefore has little credibility offers this completely irresponsible speculation—they offered him the chief executive spot once Prince retires.

The major problem with this notion is that it leads directly to the question of why Sallie Krawcheck would stick around Citi if she wasn't expecting to score the chief executive spot. With Thomson out of the way, she faced little internal competition. And surely her network inside Citi is good enough that she'd know if Crittenden had been promised the top slot. We suspect that if Krawcheck knew that succeeding Prince was out of the question, she would leave Citi altogether. She certainly doesn't need the money, and even if she did there are plenty of other Wall Street firms who would be all too eager to score someone of her stature.

So we're faced with a paradox. It's not entirely plausible that both Krawcheck and Crittenden would both be at Citi if either one of them had been promised the top slot. And it's not entirely plausible that either one of them would be there without such a promise. Yet there they both are.

Facts are stubborn things. Is there a way to untie this Gordian knot? Well, perhaps they've both been promised the top spot. If that sounds way too scheming, too much like something out of HBO's "Rome"—well we suggest you do some reading up about what happened when Citicorp and Travelers merged. Short answer—Citicorp head John Reed and Travelers boss Sandy Weill shook hands and agreed to jointly run the place. Next thing anybody knew, Reed was gone and Sandy sat alone at the top of the newly minted Citigroup.

There's always the more innocent answer, of course. That is that neither Crittenden nor Krawcheck have been promised anything, and will both spend the next few years fighting to establish themselves as the CEO-in-waiting. Which, come to think of it, sounds like it will have exactly the same result as the two promise paranoid theory. Pick your poison. Either one sounds like it should make for some interesting times at a Citigroup facing the world without its umbrella.

[Note: An earlier version of this item incorrectly identified Crittenden as the former CEO of American Express.]

Citigroup Lists Crittenden Pay [Wall Street Journal]

John Mack, like the Tom Arnold of investment banking (take a second on that one), has overcome huge odds to fight his way back to the top of his game.** Last year, the Morgan Stanley chief, who was shown the door in 2001, received a raise of 38% to take home $41.4 million, reports CNN Money. The package was comprised of a base salary of $800,000, $36.2 million in restricted stock, $4 million in other stock options, miscellaneous compensation of $15,447, $67,963 in pension benefits, $6,100 in matching 401(k) money and, perhaps most importantly, in the parlance of our times, use of the company jet valued at $321,848.

Earlier: How Goldman's Managed To Stay Out Of The Backdating Scandal

Morgan's Mack sees hefty pay raise [CNN Money]

**Rocky seemed too easy and we thought it was about time we—Carney—went public with our feelings for Carpool.

Is it too early to start talking about bonuses for 2007? Bear Stearns doesn't think so. It has already set up a bonus pool for its top executives, according to a recent SEC filing.

From Reuters:

A maximum bonus pool of $165 million has been established for a group of five senior executives that includes Bear Stearns Chief Executive James Cayne, the company said. Payout will be pegged to the company's return on equity. No executive can get more than 30 percent of the total pool, which can be as little as zero.

Bear Stearns' compensation committee also approved the performance goals for a second bonus pool for seven other top executives. The maximum amount will be $140 million, with awards based on pretax return on equity, departmental income and expense controls.

These numbers include cash and non-cash bonuses. So if you do the math, the maximum bonus for, say, James Cayne for 2007 will be $49.5 million, or about $3 million dollars less than the co-presidents of Goldman Sachs got for last year.

We can't help thinking that this suggests a new recruiting slogan for Bear Stearns: "Bear Stearns: It's like working for Goldman in 2005. Wall Street The Old Fashioned Way."

Bear Stearns Companies Inc 8-K [SEC]

Bear Stearns sets up $305 mln executive bonus pool [Reuters]

The bidding war for the Spanish-language television network Univision was one of the greatest private equity stories of last year. Now the winners of that auction--including, Thomas H. Lee Partners, Texas Pacific Group, Madison Dearborn Partners, Providence Equity Partners and media mogul Haim Saba--are on the hunt for a CEO. Choosing the right man to run a company is one of the things that private equity firms pride themselves on doing very well. According to the New York Post, the owners of Univision are very close to naming their man.

The announcement is expect in a week or two, and despite rumors it seems unlikely that Univision will be run by former Mexican president Vincente Fox. So who is going to run Univision?

From the Post

Univision is viewed as having strong talent internally, including current CFO Andy Hobson and President Ray Rodriguez.

But Univision's new owners are believed to be looking for a high-status bilingual exec with close ties to Mexico.

Leave your best guess in the comments section below. No points for answering "George W. Bush." He has other commitments until at least 2008.

Univision Narrowing Search For CEO

It's now been a full day since Credit Suisse announced it had tapped American Brady Dougan to be its next chief executive. Everyone's been scrambling to figure out just who this Dougan fellow is and what it means. Fortunately, DealBreaker spent our morning scouring the business media for news, insights and colorful stories so you don't have to. Bloomberg, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal's "Heard on the Street" seem to have all the best stuff. And since it's Friday, and we love to do Media Roundups on Fridays, we bring you the Brady Dougan Media Roundup.

Beverage Preference: Diet Dr. Pepper, according to the New York Times. This clashes with a 2005 Business Week story claiming Dougan was a Diet Pepsi enthusiast.

To add to the confusion, the NYT notes "When the executive board of Credit Suisse went to dinner at the Savoy in Zurich Wednesday night to celebrate his appointment, Mr. Dougan dined on agnoletti and Diet Coke."

The unanswered questions: Has Dougan always preferred Diet Dr. Pepper? Has he switched? Or did someone get this detail wrong? Is Diet Dr. Pepper unavailable at the Savoy in Zurich?

DealBreaker was too ashamed to contact Credit Suisse with these pressing questions.

Nationality: American. First American ever to run Credit Suisse.

Exercise Preference: Marathons, according to the NYT, the Wall Street Journal and just about everyone else. The NYT has the killer detail—"his best time was 2 hours and 21 minutes (a pace of about 5 minutes and 40 seconds a mile)." Sometimes works out twice a day (NYT).

Personality type: He's a "shy workaholic" (Times) who sometimes works "18 hour days" (WSJ).

Work ethic: "Legendary" (NYT). Known to arrive at work at 5 am.

Age: Forty-seven, which as almost everyone notes, makes him the youngest head ever of "a global banking giant" (NYT).

Fashion statement: It seems that everyone notes he doesn't wear cuff-links. But this is old news. Business Week noted it in 2005. Who wears cuff-links in 2007 anyway? The NYT goes further, describing Dougan as " disheveled."

Marital status: Divorced. Two kids. (NYT)

Social life: "Intensely private" the NYT notes, adding that Dougan "does not appear in the social pages nor does he seem to revel in the fine wine and bright lights of Manhattan’s financial elite." Indeed, a search of NYSocialDiary.com found not one entry for Dougan.

Financial background: He started out as a derivatives guy, and his elevation makes him the first derivatives guy to run a global banking institution. (Bloomberg)

Managerial Reputation: He's a famous cost-cutter. He cut back on town cars (NYT), color copying and staff parties (Bloomberg)

Risks: "A question mark is Mr. Dougan's ability to lead Credit Suisse's other core business, wealth management," the WSJ says.

Hidden Talent: From the Times of London: "he has twice dressed up at corporate functions as the blonde one in Abba. The female one, that is. Agnetha. Apparently the Swiss contingent weren’t terribly amused."

Stepping Lively at Credit Suisse [New York Times]

The American in Zurich [Wall Street Journal]

Dougan Leads Derivative Traders to First Top Bank Job [Bloomberg]

Despite the complaints we constantly hear about the outsized power of the Swiss from some of our favorite bankers at Credit Suisse here in New York, especially those few still lingering around from the days before they erased the name First Boston from the earth, Credit Swiss just put a young American in its corner office.

Credit Suisse Group, rebounding from years in the shadow of its bigger rival UBS AG, reported record fourth-quarter earnings of 4.67 billion francs ($3.8 billion) and elevated Brady Dougan, a former derivatives trader, to succeed Oswald Gruebel as chief executive officer.

The promotion of the 47-year-old Dougan, who started his career 25 years ago at New York-based Bankers Trust Corp., makes him the first American to take sole possession of the executive suite at the second-largest Swiss bank and shows the growing influence of Wall Street on the global capital markets.

So who is this Brady Dougan fellow who has conquered the gnomes? Dougan first came to widespread public attention when he took over Credit Suisse's investment bank in 2004 after the departure of John Mack. At the time, he was said to be the youngest CEO on Wall Street. According to a 2005 Business Week article, "Brady W. Dougan bears few of the outward signs of power on Wall Street. He doesn't wear flashy cuff links. He doesn't play golf. And he doesn't drink fine wines -- just Diet Coke."

He's also known as a controversial cost-cutter who let go an prominent high-yield bond banker, spun-off the private equity business just before private equity became the next big thing, and notoriously ordered employees to cut down on office supplies and expenses, such as color copies.

But, of course, our readers are usually our best sources. So we're turning it over to you. In the comments section below, we invite you to share any rumors or tales of actual encounters with young Brady.

Credit Suisse Promotes Dougan to CEO; Earnings Rise [Bloomberg]