Former Merrill Lynch CEO Thain Tapped to Head CIT

John Thain is back. The ex-CEO of Merrill Lynch, who also once held top posts at Goldman Sachs and the New York Stock Exchange, has returned to the Wall Street fold, this time as chairman and CEO of the CIT Group. However, this time, one imagines he won’t have a $35K commode at his disposal. Reuters reported Monday that Thain will bring in a $6 million salary at CIT, “mostly in restricted stock.”  —KA

“DealBook” in The New York Times:

On Monday, he will start over at a humbler institution: the CIT Group, the lender to small and midsize businesses that emerged two months ago from a swift bankruptcy, The New York Times’s Michael J. de la Merced reports.

In doing so, Mr. Thain, 54, is seeking to leave behind the controversies that haunted his final days at Merrill after it was acquired by Bank of America, a deal he helped engineer to save the brokerage during the height of the financial crisis.

As CIT’s new chairman and chief executive, he will try to rebuild a company whose bet on increasingly risky businesses led it to the brink of dissolution, only to be saved at the last minute by its creditors.

CIT also bears the ignominy of being the first company in which the government realized a loss under its $700 billion federal bailout program.

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U.S. Department of State

Thain again: Former Merrill Lynch honcho John Thain is shown here talking about the New York Stock Exchange in 2006.