00:00What happened to Merrill Lynch that required you to effectively sell the company?
00:04You know, it was a great firm, and we had a great set of businesses at the time.
00:09And I think it's been an incredible deal for Bank America.
00:12We own half of BlackRock, which people forget,
00:15which was a deal that I put together in 2006 with Larry Fink.
00:18We own 49% of BlackRock. I sat on their board.
00:21We had a great wealth management business, a good investment bank.
00:24The reason it had to be sold was really a small part of the firm.
00:27Within the fixed-income trading area, they had built up a portfolio of CDOs
00:33backed by late-stage subprime real estate collateral.
00:36And that portfolio, I think, roughly was $70 billion when we went into the crisis.
00:41And I think we wrote off $55 billion against that one portfolio.
00:46So you sell Merrill Lynch to Bank of America for the purchase price was?
00:52$50 billion, $29 a share. David, I'll never forget this.
00:55It was the most stressful stretch of my life.
00:58So after you sell, do you say, okay, I'm out of here.
01:01I'm going to go do something else and take life a little bit easier?
01:03What did you do?
01:04I went back to my 20-year Yale Law School reunion, because it was 2008.
01:08And the dean at the time was somebody named Harold Koh,
01:11who was Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State.
01:14I think he was her chief legal counsel.
01:16He was a wonderful man.
01:17He said to me, you look terrible.
01:19If you decide to take a break, come up here, teach, write,
01:22do whatever you want.
01:23It's a dean's appointment.
01:25I'm happy to have you around here.
01:26It would be good for the students.
01:28And I said to him at the time, I just engineered this sale.
01:31I did the negotiation.
01:32I feel like I need to stay.
01:34And two months later, I just realized it wasn't going to be a long-term career for me there anymore.
01:39And I called him up, and in early January 2009, I went up to Yale Law School.
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