The company was called Meridian Asset Management.
Not the Meridian portfolio that Luca had acquired — a different company, same name, a coincidence of the kind that Chicago’s financial history was full of. This Meridian had operated on the south side in the early 2000s, a mid-sized investment management firm that had collapsed in 2008 in the specific way that many firms had collapsed in 2008 — except that the collapse of this one had, according to the case study her classmate was presenting, a dimension that the official record didn’t capture.
“There’s evidence of deliberate destabilization,” her classmate was saying, sharing his screen with the case study document. “Not the market — the firm itself. Someone was systematically moving assets out of client accounts through a series of shel
