John Meriwether

Meriwether was from the Midwest, born in 1947 in the Roseland section of the South side of Chicago. His father was an accountant and his mother was employed by the Board of Education. He attended St. John de la Salle elementary school and then Mendel Catholic High School. John was good in mathematics and won a National Honor Society scholarship and a Chick Evans scholarship to attend Northwestern. He also liked gambling and began trading stocks at the age of twelve. Meriwether taught math for a year after Northwestern, then earned a business degree from the University of Chicago. He worked at CNA Financial Corporation while in business school.

He moved to New York and began to trade government bonds for Salomon and made millions of dollars for the firm. Meriwether founded the Arbitrage Group in 1977, which became the model for Long-Term Capital. He became a successful Wall...