Can Morgan Stanley’s Gorman Save Wall Street?

William D. Cohan writes: Like it or not, Wall Street, your industry has a new visionary: James Gorman, the 54-year-old, Australian-born Morgan Stanley CEO. Yes, other Wall Street bigwigs such as Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs and Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase get more attention. But Gorman stands out because he has chosen the opposite tack of the leaders at other major global financial services companies, who are still hopeful the status quo on Wall Street will be resurrected by the time the rest of the new Dodd- Frank rules and regulations get written next year….... “We are unambiguously business not as usual,” he told the Financial Times last week, “and have dramatically changed the shape of our firm.” Indeed he has. Once upon a time -- way back in 2008 -- Morgan Stanley, under CEO John Mack, was virtually indistinguishable from its archrival Goldman Sachs and was in many of the same lines of business as Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. In less than three years, Gorman has transformed the place…….. Gorman has decided, correctly, that rather than hope for a revival of the glory days on Wall Street when return on equity was more than 20 percent -- most often because traders were swinging for those fences -- the time has come to refashion Wall Street into a lower-risk, presumably far safer enterprise…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. Read all about it at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-14/can-morgan-stanley-s-gorman-save-wall-street-.html