Morgan Stanley Dealing with Destruction

Arkansas’ offices for Morgan Stanley have been instructed not to comment about its loss in the World Trade Center attack or the company’s standing going forward. Morgan Stanley, Northwest Arkansas’ third largest brokerage firm, was the facility’s largest tenant with 25 floors and about 3,500 workers.

But one of the firm’s Arkansas executives did say, “this was not a financial crisis, but a human crisis.”

About 2,000 of Morgan Stanley’s employees were evacuated Sept. 11 before terrorist attacks collapsed the center’s twin towers. The firm was far luckier than most of the 31 other brokerages that were headquartered there. According to reports by CBS news, 19 other firms were completely unaccounted for.

Arvest Asset Management Co. remained the No. 1 firm for 2000 on the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal’s annual list of the area’s top brokers. With 54 registered reps in Benton and Washington counties, they are 20 percent larger locally than A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc. and 50 percent larger than Morgan Stanley.

AXA Financial Inc., which also added a handful of reps from 1999 to 2000, was bought out by AXA of Paris, France, in December. The international brokerage already owned 60 percent of the company, and it bought up the 40 percent that remained publicly held.

The same month, AXA sold Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette of New York to Credit Suisse First Boston for $12 billion. The moves gave the North American division, now doing business as AXA Financial Advisors, access to $60 billion worth of equity compared to $6.3 in 1999.

“We have much more capital to work with,” said Troy Kestner, AXA’s Springdale vice president.

“It’s also freed us up technically because we have far more integrated worldwide resources and synergies to take advantage of than we did before.”

John R. Taylor Financial Group was acquired in late 2000 by Sterne, Agee & Leach Inc. of Birmingham, Ala., for an undisclosed amount of stock. The 100-year-old firm has 19 offices in eight states, including seven registered reps in two Arkansas offices.

Sterne Agee has $4.5 billion in assets, but for the purpose of this list the 2000 figures for John Taylor’s old firm have been used. John Taylor now serves as a senior vice president with Sterne Agee working out of its Fort Smith office.