George Chalhoub has left Merrill Lynch, where he was a director and high-yield analyst covering consumer products, metals and mining, to take a similar position at Deutsche Bank, according to Clare Schiedermayer, Merrill's manager of credit research for the Americas. He fills a void created by the departure of Lisa Gaffney last month (BW, 4/28). He could not be reached, and Andy Van Houten, co-head of high-yield research at Deutsche Bank, did not return calls.
Chalhoub was the top-ranked high-yield consumer products analyst on the 2001 Institutional Investor All-America Fixed-Income Research Team. His departure follows closely on the heels of that of Christy Parsons, a high-yield energy analyst, who left Merrill to become a managing director at CIBC World Markets earlier this month. Merrill will look outside the firm for additional high-yield analysts, though management is still deciding how it will distribute coverage among the various sectors, says Schiedermayer.
As recently as the late 1990s, Merrill was considered both an origination and secondary trading powerhouse, consistently holding down the third and fourth spots in league table rankings. But with the departure of leveraged finance chief Thomas Gahan to Deutsche Bank in 1999, the firm has steadily declined, falling to seventh in U.S. high-yield origination volume in 2000, and ninth in 2001, according to Bloomberg. So far this year, the firm is in tenth place.