Having spent his entire career at Smith Barney, Steven Black is no stranger to mergers and the blood on the floor they create. He cut his teeth on the 1992 merger of Shearson with Smith Barney, where he headed capital markets. In that position, after the merger, he took the axe to the fixed-income division.
"He's able to make very tough decisions," says Jamie Dimon, who at the time was the Shearson executive credited in the press for the cuts. "We had a pretty good yak [laugh] around here about that,"...
