William Allen Schreyer (January 13, 1928 – January 22, 2011) was chairman emeritus and former CEO of Merrill Lynch & Co., where he worked for 45 years total, eight of them as chairman and CEO. He was also a noted philanthropist and served as former president of Pennsylvania State University's Board of Trustees. Early life and education William A. Schreyer was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, on January 13, 1928. His father managed the local office of a stock brokerage that was later acquired by Merrill Lynch. As a high school student, Schreyer worked there part-time, tasked with writing the day’s stock prices on a chalkboard. Schreyer then attended Penn State, where he joined the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity. He graduated in 1948 with a degree in commerce and finance. Although he was accepted by Harvard Business School to matriculate in fall 1949, he decided instead to enroll in a new Merrill Lynch internship. Career Schreyer worked as a junior executive trainee at Merrill Lynch in Buffalo, New York, where he also met his wife Joan (née Legg). In the early 1950s he spent two years on active duty as a lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force stationed in Germany in order to fulfill his Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) obligations; this experience is purportedly when his interest in international financial markets began to emerge. He became the head of the Trenton, New Jersey office in 1963, eventually becoming the New York metropolitan regional director in 1972. He was appointed the head of Merrill Lynch Government Securities in 1973. In 1982, Schreyer was appointed President of the firm. In 1985, in an unexpected management shake‑up due to a $42 million loss in the last quarter of 1983, he rose to Chairman, and then CEO, as the incumbent Roger E. Birk stepped down. As chief executive, Schreyer "reshaped the company and improved its profitability by slimming down some of its retail operations and building up its investment banking business". He led a high-level team called the "Schreyer Working Team" whose goal was to diagnose what was wrong at Merrill; it discovered that although the bank was "bringing in more and more revenue each year", because costs were increasing at the same rate, the net impact on revenue was not positive. Unexpected costs associated with the new corporate headquarters in the World Financial Center imposed further financial burdens. The company endured further hardships