Do any dopers have any funds tied up with Morgan Stanley? And if so, what’s going on?
Since Morgan Stanley occupied 50 floors of the WTC #1, I’m assuming they are out of business. Is this true? (I’d imagine all of they’re files are wiped out.)
I recall reading in another thread that either Morgan Stanley or a very similar company have offices around the country and most likely have redundant data storage. I’m thinking that they won’t go out of business, although it may take them a while to get back up to normal operating conditions.
I’m quite sure that they do have redundant data storage.
It has been standard operating procedure for as long as I can remember for companies to back up their drives regularly, and ship copies of the data to off-site storage facilities. Viruses, system crashes, fires, etc. happen all the time. So, the companies protect themselves.
I also imagine that those records are insured, I would make sure your documents are in order as well.
I’ve got my money tied up through MSDW. They have a decent sized DC office (actually in Bethesda, MD).
I haven’t checked in with them and I don’t think I will. What would I say? “Hi Jeff, just checking in to see if you’re now the senior member of your firm. Everyone else get snuffed or what? How’s the portfolio doing?”
I just don’t think I could pull that off.
I’ve been to some company web sites to track down a few friends who work(ed) down there. The Oppenheimer site informs that while they have no info re victims, all $ data is kept on a database in Denver. I can’t imagine MSDW is any different.
to answer the OP, The destruction will not bring MSDW down financially but the repercussions from a personnel stand-point remain to be seen. As the NYC office was their center, obviously it was staffed with their brightest analysts, traders, execs and fund advisors. This is obviously a crushing blow, certainly as devastating as “losing” all their money.
I work next to a smalller Morgan Stanley office. The traders are in today, and it seems like business as usual save for the markets being closed. I haven’t had a chance to speak to anyone over there, but it seems unlikely that this will put them out of business.
I work next to a smaller Morgan Stanley office. The traders are in today, and it seems like business as usual save for the markets being closed. I haven’t had a chance to speak to anyone over there, but it seems unlikely that this will put them out of business.
I heard the 50 floors number earlier today as well, on one of the TV networks, but I think that number is incorrect. According to MSDW’s web site they had 3500 employees in the WTC. With 50 floors, that would be an average of only 70 employees per floor, which sounds very low. The original number I heard was 10 floors, which sounds a lot more reasonable.
Peter Jennings said last night that Morgan Stanley DID own 50 floors of the building but sub-let most of them.
If you look for them, you can find the companies that perform these services. As observed, most companies have contigency plans for catastrophies involving their key buildings. Not just for data recovery, but for use of facilities and so on. I know that a medium sized software company I worked for had agreements with a couple key customers to be able to get office space and servers from them in the event of a disaster affecting their headquarters. These agreements may be recipricol. Ours was. In 1989, the Loma Prieta quake disrupted us for a week. Had it reduced the building to rubble, we’d have been working at Pyramid Computer, and had something clobbered Pyramid, their employees would have moved in with us.
There’s a Morgan Stanley Dean Witter outfit in my building. The employees are there and look to be working.
Other than the loss of lives, I’m sure they have a good disaster recovery plan and should be fine in a few weeks.
Here’s the text of an e-mail that I received from Morgan Stanley indicating that they are up and running:
I worked for a company (Charles River Computers) about 10 years ago, that did some computer consulting work for Morgan Stanley. I once went to a lecture by some higher-up in their IT department about their disaster recover plans. I think I recall that he said they backup their important data in such a way that it would survive a nuclear attack on many major cities in different countries. They send their data electronically to underground vaults in different parts of the world.
At the time, I remember thinking they were crazy. If the East Coast were wiped out in a nuclear holocaust, who would care about MS’s financial data?! But – I guess we’ll see how much of that preparedness will pay off.
I spoke to a friend of mine this morning who is a broker with MSDW. He said that they were told in a con call with senior management this morning that the vast majority of their employees made it to safety before the towers came down. In fact, a newly hired co-worker (of my friend’s) was in New York for training, and he was on the highest floor MSDW occupied (the 66th) when the plane struck the tower. He was able to climb down 66 flights of stairs to safety and escape the building before the tower fell.
My friend said that the only losses the firm would incur would be paperwork rec’d in the last couple days that had not been processed yet. No large brokerage would ever allow all their information assets to reside in one physical location alone.
So MSDW is very much in business.
Hope this helps.
I was walking behind 2 MSDW employees and I overhead one saying that he only knew of one person there who died.
I know they work for MSDW because they used to have offices down in the lobby and had a big window. Whether he was talking about a MSDW employee or someone else, I don’t know, but it echos the previous message.
According to the Washington Post, the company’s main headquarters, where all the senior management were, are in midtown Manhattan and that the employees in the WTC were “mainly back-office, support, and marketing staff.” Glad to hear that most of them are believed to have gotten out OK.
People, I used to work in the biz. Morgan Stanley is a global organization. The WTC was significant but not a critical part of their operations. Their HQ is in mid-town. It looks live the vast majority of their people got out, so their trading and risk control teams are intact. Everyone has serious back up systems. Morgan Stanley has something called blue book scenarios, where senior people go through various scenarios and prepare reactions. Included in those scenarios would be where their offices go down, for example power outages and contingency plans.
I worked at Swiss Bank Corp during the Chicago floods of '92 (?), when the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) and the Mercantile exchanges were closed. They were up and running in New York again in a manner of hours, and worked out all sorts of jury rigged systems for several months.
Bank of America was HQ and had major operations in the Bay Area when the SF earthquake hit. This was a case study at Grad School. They were up an running that evening at a remote location. It was a real textbook case of how to run disaster recovery, where the biggest unplanned problem was that no one had planned on how to feed the night crew.
The markets have been shut for several days. Morgan Stanley and the other major brokers have had time to implement their disaster recovery. Assets are protected, risk is being managed. It will cost them profits but they are operational. If the major brokerages were not confident of operating, the stock markets would remain closed.
The only broker I’ve seen in the financial wires that has a big problem is Cantor Fitzgerald.
According to Bloomberg: Cantor Fitzgerald, which trades about a fourth of the U.S. government bond market, said it doesn’t know how many of its 1,000 employees in offices on the 101st-105th floors of 1 World Trade Center were in the building during the attack. Included among the firm’s missing is William Meehan, chief market analyst.
``It is clear that we have incurred a heavy loss of life among our colleagues and friends,’’ said Howard Lutnick, chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald, in a statement.
I hope that Americans will realize this is a one-off and not panic sell out of stocks like lemmings jumping off the cliff. Europe recovered some losses yesterday and closed up several percent. Asian markets are mixed at the open with Japan flat, and Hong Kong up about 2%.
Back in the eighties I worked for a few months at a student-loan servicing company in L.A. where my job was to microfilm everybody’s promissory notes and such. Copies of all the film were sent to some company that stored them underground in a nuclear-bomb-proof cave in Utah. The plan was that, after we were given the all-clear to come out of the fallout shelters, we were going to start phoning all of you college graduates and insist that you start sending us your $50/month again.
Anyway, the company I worked for, AFSA, was an incredibly half-ass, chickenshit operation, and even they didn’t have all their eggs in one basket, so I would expect these competently-run Wall Street companies to be extremely thourough in their data backups.
I have friends in the MS facilities department, and they are working to relocate formerly WTC based employees to nearby MS sites. MS had approximately 3,700 employees in 1.5 million s.f in the two towers. As of this morning, they are half way through their call list and have confirmed that 10 employees are dead. The emotional toll on the company is terrible, but they are committed to continuing with their business. Traders that were able to reported to work the very next day; once the markets return to operations, they’ll be ready to go.