Morgan Stanley swooped in, and for $13 billion in stock it now gets to clothe itself in ETrade’s digital street cred, attracting younger, tech-savvier clients to a bank whose reputation is staid even by Wall Street standards.
“It was an act of desperation by Morgan Stanley,” says Jack Ablin, chief investment officer of Cresset Capital Management, a Chicago-based wealth-management firm. “Anyone who has a Morgan Stanley account probably still has a full cable-TV package.”