In grad school I wrote a paper explaining why it made sense for Wells Fargo to "merge with" Bear Stearns. If I took out the names and replaced them with Wachovia and AG Edwards I would be a fortune teller. I would have to replace West Coast with East Coast also, but almost everything else made sense.

Recently, Citigroup merged Smith Barney and Citicorp Investment Services (the broker-types in the bank branches) and actually didn't bungle it too badly. This was an example of a great brokerage firm like Saloman Smith Barney (Saloman got canned when Citi came in years ago) showing that they can have Financial Advisors in a branch working for the same firm as the guys from the wire house (named that because they used to get their information via a proprietary wire before the Internet and not because they killed their competitors with a wire around the neck like many believe).

Wachovia Securities had already been moving that direction on the East coast of the USA (having broker-types in banks and in non-bank offices as well), but with the merging of Wachovia Securities and AG Edwards as well as the West Coast expansion of Wachovia Bank to California with the purchase of World Savings et al they can do it also (or they can show how to really fub it up like Citi did when they bought Cal Fed Bank in California).

What does this mean for the clerks of the world? More later...