Merton Miller, winner of the 1990 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, died on June 6 at the age of 77. Miller, who was often called "the father of modern corporate finance,” received the prize in 1990 for a series of papers he co-authored with fellow Nobel winner Franco Modigliani on capital structure and dividend policy, now a hallowed component of modern corporate finance theory.

Miller taught at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business for 38 years and could explain arcane economic terms—and invent new ones—with ease. He was also a passionate defender of the Chicago futures exchanges, writing extensively on derivatives-related issues in both scholarly journals and the mainstream press.

"Merton never accepted conventional wisdom. Instead he questioned everything, subjecting every proposition to the power of his phenomenal intellect,” says William Sharpe, professor of finance emeritus at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, one of Miller's many co-authors.

Miller's forecasts, however, weren't always accurate. "In 1968, he told many of us in the Ph.D. program at Chicago that everything had already been discovered in finance and that we should consider going into another field,” says Richard Roll, a professor at the John E. Anderson School of Business at the University of California Los Angeles. "Of course, he himself proved that forecast wrong in many later research contributions.”

Six years after being fired by Kidder Peabody for his alleged role in the firm's demise, and a year after writing his racially charged memoir, Black and White on Wall Street, Joseph Jett is still in hot water.

Immediately after the book was published, it was clear that Jett's recollection of his experience at Kidder didn't jibe with those of the people he excoriates in the book. His former boss, Edward Cerullo, last year sued Jett and his publisher, William Morrow and Co. (which Hearst subsequently sold to HarperCollins parent News Corp.), for defamation, and asked for $10 million in damages. HarperCollins immediately stopped shipping the book after hearing about the suit.

But Cerullo still hasn't had much luck setting the wheels of justice in motion. His biggest problem: Jett's nowhere to be found. Cerullo's lawyers have been looking for the Jett-setter since last August so they could serve him the summons that will officially begin the proceeding.

Now, frustrated, Cerullo's attorneys have dropped Jett from the suit entirely, instead going after Morrow, HarperCollins and Jett's collaborator on the book, Sabra Chartrand.

The book, you may recall, paints Cerullo as a power-wielding racist. Jett also claimed that Cerullo knew about his trading strategies and was trying to wrest control of Kidder away from parent company General Electric.

In December 1996, an arbitration panel decided that Jett should keep more than $5 million in bonus money—which seemingly vindicated Jett from wrongdoing (federal prosecutors decided not to press criminal charges). But in 1998, an SEC administrative law judge ruled that Jett had made his money ‘'in a pyramid-like manner, in order to book profits which were in fact nonexistent and receive large bonuses based on profits.'' Jett was ordered to give back $8.21 million and pay a $200,000 fine, and was banned from the securities industry indefinitely.

Morrow's main line of defense is a common one in defamation suits: It didn't know Jett's information wasn't completely true. But that might not stand up in light of the SEC's overwhelmingly negative ruling. And if that happens, Morrow would be left holding the bag, since the peripatetic Jett still hasn't surfaced.

Our suggestion: check the Hamptons. It's usually teeming with bond traders this time of year.

• Michelle Toh, former co-head of the Asian credit rating advisory department at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, has joined Credit Suisse First Boston as vice president on the ratings advisory team.
• OperationalRisk.com has announced a number of new hires. Tony Blunden, former head of compliance and operational risk for Credit Suisse Financial Products, has been named senior client manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa in the firm's London office. Penny Cagan, former head of research at Deutsche Bank NA, has joined the firm's New York office to take charge of its Operational Risk Information Center and loss database. Bruce Campbell, who formerly led IBM's banking, finance and securities risk management practice in North America, has joined the New York office as vice president of business development and professional services. And Joseph Swipes, former vice president of operational risk management at Deutsche Bank, has joined the New York product management and client services team, specializing in risk assessment and quantification.
• Bluford Putnam, former president of CDC Investment Management, has resigned. His responsibilities will be divided between Sykes Wilford, who has been promoted to chief investment officer, and Peter Paterno, who is now the firm's COO.
• Commerzbank Securities has named Olivier Moreau head of credit derivatives trading; he previously held the same job at BNP Paribas. The firm also named Hugues de la Marnierre, former global coordinator for equity derivatives marketing at Paribas, head of pan-European derivatives sales.
• Jane Staunton, formerly a principal with MSCI Europe, will join FTSE Americas as COO.
• UBS Warburg has announced the appointment of F. Burke Dempsey as a managing director in the financial institutions group in corporate finance; he had been executive vice president and director of capital markets at www.fbr.com, an on-line subsidiary of Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co. Craig Fitt has also joined the firm as an executive director and U.S. head of ratings advisory; he had held a similar position at Credit Suisse First Boston in New York.
• Arshad Zakaria, former managing director and head of the global corporate finance group in investment banking at Merrill Lynch, has been promoted to senior vice president and head of corporate risk management.
• The Bank for International Settlements'committee on payments and settlements has appointed Tommasso Padoa-Schioppa its new chairman. He is a member of the executive board of the European Central Bank and was chairman of the BIS working group on payment systems of the central banks of the European Community from 1991 to 1995.

  Errata
  In our May issue, we published the wrong photo for Mark Tawney, director of weather risk management at Enron. We apologize for the error and are publishing the correct photo here.