It has been three years since Morgan Stanley won any of Euromoney's global awards. That fallow period coincided with the end of the bull market in stocks and M&A that had made Morgan Stanley - and Goldman Sachs - such a force in the 1990s. In the new marquee businesses - debt markets - both found themselves slipping down the tables as US universal banks Citigroup, JPMorgan and to a lesser extent Bank of America rose to prominence. Morgan Stanley quietly chugged along, remaining a top player in a much depressed M&A market and continuing as a major player in emerging-market sovereign bond underwriting.
It has been quietly rebuilding its corporate bond franchise, where it had in any event slipped less than Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs. "We did a fair amount of restructuring in fixed income," says Vikram Pandit, co-head of the institutional securities business. "We spent the last 18 months digesting it. We used to have eight or nine subsections, and have rationalized those to three: interest rates, credit and commodities. And we've also cranked up our investment in fixed-income research."
As a result it has had a strong showing in high-grade corporate bonds in the past year, where in the US it has displaced Lehman Brothers as the highest-placed pure investment bank in the league tables.