Talk:Merchant bank

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[edit] Merchant Bank vs Investment Bank

I know someone is working on cleaning up this article from Project Galatea - can I just add my tuppence worth that "Investment Bank" in today's lexicon is quite a different thing to a "Merchant Bank", and indeed I would say the latter is dying out as a concept. An Investment Bank will tend to be a full-service, full scale operation combining Advisory (initial public offerings, mergers and acquisitions, capital markets issuance); Asset Management, Principal Investment, Trust and agency services and Brokerage/Trading (fixed income, currency, commodities, equity, debt and derivatives sales and trading) functions.

Examples are Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, etc. A Merchant Bank traditionally was more restricted to Advisory and Principal Investment, and was common in the city of London prior to the "big bang" in 1986, at which point Brokerage and Advisory functions were no longer required legally to be separated. Larger British retail banks and American investment banks arrived, and consolidated the existing merchant banking operations into their operations. Philip Augar has written a very good book "The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism" which describes the process of the Big Bang in London. ElectricRay 11:45, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

I agree. "Merchant Bank" is not a synonym for "Investment Bank," or even a quaint, archaic term for it.HedgeFundBob 14:38, 21 March 2007 (UTC)