Career
Schreyer worked as a junior executive trainee at Merrill Lynch in Buffalo, New York, where he also met his wife Joan (née Legg). In the early 1950s he spent two years on active duty as a lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force stationed in Germany in order to fulfill his Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) obligations; this experience is purportedly when his interest in international financial markets began to emerge. He became the head of the Trenton, New Jersey office in 1963, eventually becoming the New York metropolitan regional director in 1972. He was appointed the head of Merrill Lynch Government Securities in 1973.
In 1982, Schreyer was appointed President of the firm. In 1985, in an unexpected management shake‑up due to a $42 million loss in the last quarter of 1983, he rose to Chairman, and then CEO, as the incumbent Roger E. Birk stepped down. As chief executive, Schreyer "reshaped the company and improved its profitability by slimming down some of its retail operations and building up its investment banking business".
He led a high-level team called the "Schreyer Working Team" whose goal was to diagnose what was wrong at Merrill; it discovered that although the bank was "bringing in more and more revenue each year", because costs were increasing at the same rate, the net impact on revenue was not positive. Unexpected costs associated with the new corporate headquarters in the World Financial Center imposed further financial burdens. The company endured further hardships in 1987 as Black Monday coincided with the company's $377 million loss on mortgage-backed securities in 1987.
Bill Schreyer responded to these financial hardships with a cost-restructuring effort that he called "Merristroika", a portmanteau of "Merrill" and "perestroika". First, he sold the sprawling real estate services division, which was located entirely in the United States; Schreyer considered international securities, with large presences in London and Tokyo, as well as in New York and around the United States, to be the future of Merrill Lynch. Indeed, Schreyer's restructuring set the foundation for Merrill's admission to the Tokyo Stock Exchange, one of the first foreign firms to do so. Furthermore, it became the first American investment bank to open a representative office in China.
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