Morgan Stanley (MS)
Q4 2009 Earnings Call Transcript
January 20, 2010 11:00 a.m. ET

Executives

James P. Gorman - President, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Head of Strategic Planning
Thomas Colm Kelleher - Executive Vice President, Co-President, Institutional Securities
Ruth Porat - Chief Financial Officer

Analysts

Michael Carrier - Deutsche Bank Securities
Howard Chen - Credit Suisse
Guy Moszkowski - Banc of America/Merrill Lynch
Glenn Schorr - UBS
Roger Freeman - Barclays Capital
Michael Mayo - CLSA
Michael Hecht - JMP Securities

Presentation

Operator

Welcome to the Morgan Stanley conference call. The following is a live broadcast by Morgan Stanley and is provided as a courtesy. Please note that this call is being broadcast on the Internet through the company’s website at www.morganstanley.com. A replay of the call and webcast will be available through the company’s website and by phone for a period of seven days.

This presentation may contain forward-looking statements. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date on which they are made which reflect management’s current estimates, projections, expectations or beliefs and which are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially.

For a discussion of additional risk and uncertainties that may affect the future results of Morgan Stanley, please see Morgan Stanley’s annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended November 30, 2008, annual report on Form 10-K, Morgan Stanley’s 2009 quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and Morgan Stanley’s current reports on Form 8-K.

The presentation may also include certain non-GAAP financial measures. The reconciliation of such measures to the comparable GAAP figures are included in Morgan Stanley’s annual report on Form 10-K, Morgan Stanley’s 2009 quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and Morgan Stanley’s 2009 current reports on Form 8-K, which are available on Morgan Stanley’s website, www.morganstanley.com.

Any recording, rebroadcast or other use of this presentation in whole or in part is strictly prohibited without prior written consent of Morgan Stanley. This presentation is copyrighted and proprietary to Morgan Stanley.

At this time, I would like to turn the program over to James Gorman for today’s call.

James P. Gorman

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everybody. I’m delighted to be here. I wanted to join you for our first call under my watch as CEO and I’m here with Colm Kelleher and Ruth Porat and the rest of the team.

Before we review our financial results, I’d like to do a couple of things, review our accomplishments and provide a brief outlook. Looking back, 2009 was a year of transition in which the firm achieved a number of milestones.

We maintained a prudent balance sheet and held appropriate levels of capital and leverage while reducing our troubled exposures. We were among the first bank to repurchase TARP and the associated warrant. We raised $6.9 billion in common equity and sold our remaining interest in MSCI enhancing our capital structure.

We issued a total of $13 billion in unguaranteed senior unsecured debt including a fourth quarter 1.5 billion euro raise, which was our first non-U.S. dollar unguaranteed issuance of 2009.

We made significant progress on our global hiring plan which is on track. The new hires are primarily in our sales and trading businesses, further building out our footprint and expanding our client franchise.

We closed the Morgan Stanley Smith Barney joint venture earlier than expected creating the industry leader with more than 18,000 financial advisors and over $1.5 trillion in client assets.