re: Whatever happened to Dean Witter?

I started working at Morgan Stanley after the demise of Dean Witter- I’m not sure what happened exactly but it was F’d up!! Sears wanted a dean witter in every mall store so they bought DW but quickly realized that wasn’t going to work so they had to package Discover with DW just to sell it to Morgan Stanley(MS at the time had high end customers/big companies and wanted the common folks too) The topper was the DW CEO wined and dined the board so much he got the job when the companies merged even though MS bought out DW!! And if that isn’t crazy enough, the former MS CEO and about 10 of the old higher ups didn’t get new jobs, just started a campaign to get their jobs back- by advertising in the WSJ etc about how bad the new crew was- and it worked!! They eventually fired the DW staff and hired the old MS staff back, that’s when I started when all the changes were taken place.
All of that happened with the dot com bubble bursting-9/11 recession and MS having some serious fines for insider trading. The DW accounts were pretty much forgotten about and only the extreme high end clients brought under the MS umbrella. Morgan Stanley was in such bad shape at the time they were begging for someone to buy them out (Chase and Jamie Dimon refused to take them for free basically). It’s a wonder they are thriving now.