Kidder, Peabody & Co.

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Kidder, Peabody & Co.

Type	Subsidiary of UBS AG
Founded	1865
Headquarters	Massachusets
Industry	Investment banking
Products	Financial Services

Kidder, Peabody & Co. was a U.S.-based securities firm, established in Massachusetts in 1865. Its operations included investment banking, brokerage, and trading. The Firm was sold to the General Electric Corporation in 1986 and subsequently sold to PaineWebber in 1994. Following its acquisition by PaineWebber, the Kidder, Peabody name was dropped, ending the firm's 130 year presence on Wall Street. In November 2000, PaineWebber itself was merged with UBS AG.

Shortly after GE bought Kidder in 1986, a skein of insider trading scandals, which came to define the Street of the 1980s and were depicted in the James Stewart bestseller Den of Thieves, swept Wall Street. The firm was implicated when former Kidder executive Martin Seigel—who had since left for Michael Milken's junk-bond investment firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert—admitted to selling inside information.

Also implicated by Martin Seigel was Richard Wigton, head of Arbitrage trading for Kidder Peabody. Richard was the only executive handcuffed in his office as part of the trading scandal, an act that was later depicted in the movie Wall Street. Later the US prosecutor, Rudy Guliani, admitted that Richard was innocent.

Kidder Peabody was later involved in a trading scandal related to false profits booked over the course of 1990–1994. Joe Jett, a trader on the strips and recons desk had been systematically generating false trades to inflate the profits for his desk. Joe was Kidder's Man of the year in 1993. Joe had lost 75 million dollars over the four years instead of the apparent profit of 275 million dollars over the same period.

In the rush of bad press coverage following the disclosure of the overstated profits, General Electric sold the assets of Kidder Peabody to PaineWebber for $70 Million in October 1994, closing the transaction in January 1995.