Chase: Back in the bulge-bracket
There are two reasons: strategy and implementation Strategically it was a merger of two institutions whose business platforms, both wholesale and retail, were identical, and whose emphasis on diverse earnings streams mirrored each other. Both banks needed to improve market positions - and they did. Strong product leadership and the fact that most of our businesses jumped from number five, six or seven to number one, two or three produced less earnings volatility. So the strategic goal was different from some of the other mergers.
Second, we focused on management discipline. We put a tremendous amount of effort into building systems which allowed us to manage risk in a very pro-active way. The systems in the new companies are different from the heritage companies which they evolved from. They clearly allowed us to manage our risks in 1997 and 1998 in ways that we wouldn't have been able to historically. What happened in 1998 [when Chase had record earnings, while many financial institutions were faced with trading losses owing to the market's volatility] was not an accident.
Those credit and market-risk systems are reinforced by an SVA [shareholder value added, a variant of economic value added] system.