Meriwether had the particular genius to bring this group to Wall Street—a move that Salomon’s competitors would later imitate. “He took a bunch of guys who in the corporate world were considered freaks,” noted Jay Higgins, then an investment banker at Salomon. “Those guys would be playing with their slide rules at Bell Labs if it wasn’t for John, and they knew it.”9 The professors were brilliant at reducing a trade to pluses and minuses; they could strip a ham sandwich to its component risks; but they could barely carry on a normal conversation. Meriwether created a safe, self-contained place
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