The year: 2009. The place: Merrill Lynch wealth management division. The who: Sallie Krawcheck. The problem: Merrill had mismanaged its Stable Value Fund sold to 401(k). Turns out, the fund was anything but stable, Krawcheck reveals to Fast Company for the first time ever.
Here’s what happened next:
“There were two options, one of which was to say tough luck to the Walmart employees who owned the Stable Value Fund,” says Krawcheck. “Or to put money in in order to increase the [fund’s] value.”
Krawcheck, who had just been fired as head of CitiGroup’s wealth management division for reimbursing clients for their losses, quickly felt “déjà vu” in her new role.
“I’d lost my job once for doing this. . . . Did I want to do it again?” she recalls. “And the answer is, I did.”
She adds: “It wasn’t a lot of sleepless nights. In a way, I had set precedent for myself on this. I set precedent at [Smith] Barney’s that I was willing to lose my job for it.”
In a rare huzzah for Ken Lewis, then CEO of the merged Bank of America/Merrill Lynch gave his support 100% to Krawcheck. Which is really something. It was in the heart of the financial crisis; returning money that was hard to come by was not a gimme. But Merrill did it.
Krawcheck concludes: “I didn’t get fired from it. In fact, you’d never even read about it until today.”
Photo by Fortune Live Media via Flickr.