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Three years ago, as we were wondering whether we were witnessing the complete meltdown of the financial services industry, Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch and Barclays took over the bankrupt Lehman Brothers. Steven Davidoff --professor at the Michael E. Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University--looks back at those deals, and he argues Barclays won, and Bank of America did not. And the primary reason, Davidoff writes at the New York Times DealBook blog, is because Barclays was more patient: Things would have been different had Bank of America waited. It would at a minimum have paid a bargain basement price for Merrill, one that was tens of billions lower at least. There is still some talk of spinning off Merrill Lynch. The operations of Merrill have already been combined with Bank of America, so a real separation would be complicated. And the recent reorganization of the bank’s management — which puts Merrill Lynch’s wealth management business under David Darnell, the co-chief operating officer, but Bank of America-Merrill Lynch under the other chief operating officer, Tom Montag — also makes a split more difficult. Ultimately, Barclays made a better deal by doing what should be done in an acquisition, carefully assessing the future liabilities and limiting them as much as possible. But let’s be clear. Barclays did this only because it was forced to by the regulator. The first lesson of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch is that impatience and a chief executive’s hubris can lead to some very bad decisions. And regulators can sometimes stop these heady moves. Read The Merrill Lynch and Lehman Deals, 3 Years Later here .

The financial pages are abuzz over the anniversary of the the collapse of Lehman Brothers , and President Obama is going to mark the occasion by speaking about Wall Street on Wall Street. He is expected to address regulatory reform and the government's continuing efforts to drive economic recovery. As for Lehman Brothers , David DeMuro provides a particularly interesting perspective. DeMuro was Lehman's head of compliance and regulation. Earlier this summer he spoke at Complinet , a firm specializing in compliance issues. And DeMuro stressed that the issues at Lehman were not unique to that firm. He places a lot of blame for the collapse on a sort of bubble euphoria. He and others may have seen red flags, particularly with mortgage subsidiaries, but the firm did not change its ways because of what DeMuro calls an "almost religious belief in the veracity of the models that comforted a lot of people": The Great Crash of 2008: An Insider's View of a Global Economy in Crisis and the Regulatory Failures from complinet on Vimeo .