Wall Street
After the War, he joined Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc. in 1946, as an account executive trainee, working up through the ranks, eventually taking over as Merrill Lynch's chairman and CEO in 1971, the year the company went public. He held those positions until 1980.
Regan was one of the original directors of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation and was vice chairman of the New York Stock Exchange from 1973 to 1975. Regan was a major proponent of brokerage firms going public, which he viewed as an important step in the modernization of Wall Street; under his supervision, Merrill Lynch had its IPO on June 23, 1971, becoming only the second Wall Street firm to go public, after Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette.
During his tenure in these two positions, Regan also pushed hard for an end to minimum fixed commissions for brokers, which were fees that brokerage companies had to charge clients for every transaction they made on the clients' behalf; Regan saw them as a cartel-like restriction. In large part thanks to his lobbying, fixed commissions were abolished in 1975.
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