Keeping up with the reshuffles at the top of Merrill Lynch can be exhausting. The bank has had eight different heads of European investment banking since 2000. The problem, according to employees past and present, is that European senior management has never been granted enough autonomy from the bank's Wall Street engine room to be able to enjoy stability and reward its best people.

So when Andrea Orcel, global head of Merrill's financial institutions group, became the latest head of the European business last September, outsiders suggested the bank was facing another round of damaging political upheaval. One person who resigned from the bank before Orcel's appointment, said: "All investment banks have politics and egos, but Merrill is by far the worst. Also, it has consistently failed to invest in its European business and that is why I left."