A picture is worth a thousand words.  Recently you were sent an email about Merrill “being in danger of failure”. The non-remote  chance of this is pummeling Merrill’s stock, which in-turn hurts the company since they have to pay penalty payments to their new shareholders (that helped bail the company out in the spring of this year).   
 

Merrill is paying a rather large fine – $125M in the ARS scandal in part because NY State investigators unearthed embarrassing emails. The head of auction rate securities at Merrill was selling his personal ARS holdings while his company was busy selling ARS to their clients.  This reminds me of Merrill Lynch’s infamous analyst from the dot-com bust: Henry Blodget. (google “blodgeting” – that’s how famous he is).