Last night on Nightline it was reported that “most” of the 3500 MSDW employees on 21 floors are safe. They did not give a number but usde the word “most.”
All contingency plans went OK. You should hear from your FA some time soon. Most of us got out of the building OK, the vast majority got out. We’re fine, your money’s fine, your account’s fine, we’re fine, the building’s fucked, I want to go home, etc etc etc.
Now Salomon, on the other hand, just might be fucked. They were in WTC7 and I understand their congingency (backup) plan got cut two months ago due to low trading commissions. I dunno what’s going to happen with them, it might be a while while they reconstruct their records. Or I could be completely wrong. My source is a conversation with a Smith Barney IT department manager from WTC7 at the volunteer center outside the Something Something Center Wednesday morning. Nice guy.
According to Bloomberg, Morgan Stanley says less than 15 staff are unaccounted for. Lehman Brothers say 1 is missing, Bank of America say 8, unfortunately Cantor Fitzgerald most likely lost all 700 employees that were in their office (300 are said to have survived and were out of the office at the time).
I would suspect that Soloman’s will send their traders/risk control people to various Smith Barney offices if they lack a specific backup.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nyt/20010913/tc/tragedy_seems_even_greater_for_one_firm_1.html
Cantor Fitzgerald lost 700 of its 2300 employees worldwide.
No one in the headquarters on the 101st-105th floors got out.
300 were on vacation or out of the office and presumably the other 1300 were in other locations.
I got this from my mom yesterday:
I got a fright when I saw that the largest tenant of the World Trade Center was Morgan Stanley, since they have all my money! Anyway, I called my broker and he told me what I thought was amazing. They had 1000 people in the first building on a lower floor and 2500 in the second building on the upper floors. When the first one was hit, all the 1000 got out and the 2500 hundred in the other building started evacuating. By the time that one got hit they were all low enough in the building so they were below the danger zone and they all got out. So I said that was wonderful, of course, but asked him about all the records - computers esp. He said that when the building was hit by terrorists a few years ago they perfected a system of backup computers in New Jersey. Everything is intact and they are ready to go.
There is a building right across the Hudson from the WTC. I’ve been to the Lehman facility there. Basically, they had a huge IT infrastructure, lots of empty space, and a lot of admin and developer kinda people there. IIRC, that was where the IT headquarters was. Guaranteed, that place is stuffed with Lehman people operating.
It’s been 5 years, but either Merrill or Morgan Stanley or both had a similar set up there.
Solly will be fine, too. Remember that they live under the Travellers’ umbrella now. 7WTC has been a minor site for them, in the scheme of things, for a while now. They had a lot of asset management people there, including dozens of friends of mine, but the human toll for them was low. They will re-locate into Citi or Smith Barney or other vacant space (they’ve been doing layoffs for a while now) and their telcom guys will have them fully up and running by Tuesday at the latest.
I say this as a direct competitor of them.