In the fall of 2008, a Wall Street firm with a famous name was running out of time.

Its shares lost about three quarters of their value in four weeks. Much of the rescue came from a bank in Tokyo. And because the money arrived on an American bank holiday, it came as a paper check for $9 billion.

Most investors know this firm's name. Few know how close it came, or what it did next.

Six months after the check, it cut its dividend from 27 cents a share each quarter to a nickel. Then it rebuilt it. Since 2014, it has raised the dividend in every year but one, and today it pays $1.15 a quarter. That's 23 times the nickel.

Today, we'll show you how a firm that nearly went under in 2008 turned in record results in 2025. We'll show you why a business it doubled down on in the darkest months of the crisis now brings in nearly half its revenue. And we'll tell you whether it made our list of 25 holdings this quarter.

Let's start at the beginning...

After the crash of 1929, Congress decided that a bank taking deposits should not also sell new stocks and bonds. The Banking Act of 1933, known as Glass Steagall, made banks pick one.

The great private bank at the corner of Wall Street and Broad Street chose deposits.

So a group of its people walked out the door to carry on the other business. Two of them gave the new firm its name. One was a grandson of the man the bank was named after. The other had been a partner there since 1927. On September 16, 1935, the new firm opened just down the street, at 2 Wall Street.

By the end of its first full year, it had won about 24% of the market for negotiated corporate and foreign securities issues. In the decades that followed, it raised money for General Motors, IBM and the World Bank.

Its clients were corporations and governments.

That stockbroker had been built to do what the old partnership did not: sell stocks and funds to ordinary investors.

Sears bought it in 1981 for $600 million, with a plan to offer financial services through its stores. In 1993, Sears spun it off.

In 1997, the two firms merged. It was often called a marriage of white shoes and white socks. The stockbroker, which by then also owned the Discover Card, was actually worth more on the stock market than the famous investment bank.

Now the old partnership had an army of brokers serving everyday investors.

Keep that army of brokers in mind. We'll come back to it.

On Monday, September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.

This firm's shares closed at $37.23 on Friday, September 12. Four weeks later, on Friday, October 10, they closed at $9.68.

It was one of the last two major investment banks left in America. On Sunday, September 21, the Federal Reserve approved its request to become a bank holding company. On September 29, Mitsubishi UFJ, Japan's largest financial group, agreed to invest $9 billion for a 21% stake.

The deal had to close fast. It closed on Monday, October 13, 2008. That was Columbus Day, and American banks were shut, so the money could not be wired. Mitsubishi UFJ handed over a paper check for $9 billion.

The whole market rallied that day. This firm's shares nearly doubled, to $18.10.

Later that month, it also took $10 billion from a U.S. Treasury rescue program.

In January 2009, with the crisis still raging, the firm agreed to combine its wealth management business with Citigroup's brokerage business. It owned 51% of the new venture, which brought together more than 20,000 financial advisors and $1.7 trillion of client assets when it was announced.

Its chief executive said wealth management would be "an increasingly important and profitable part" of the business in the years ahead.

In April 2009, after a quarterly loss, it cut the dividend from 27 cents a share to 5 cents. That kept about $1 billion of extra capital inside the firm every year. It paid that nickel for five years.

Then it kept building. In 2013, it bought out Citigroup's remaining stake. In 2014, it raised the dividend for the first time since the crisis. It has raised it every year since, except 2020, when the Federal Reserve stopped big banks from raising dividends that summer. In 2020, it bought E*TRADE for $13 billion in stock. In 2021, it bought the fund manager Eaton Vance.

In 2025, revenue reached a record $70.6 billion. Net income was $16.9 billion, or $10.21 a share, the highest of the past ten years.

And remember that army of brokers?

Wealth management brought in a record $31.8 billion last year, about 45% of the total, and earned $9.3 billion before taxes. In late 2008, the firm's own wealth business looked after $546 billion for clients. With everything it has bought and built since, its wealth and investment management businesses reached $10 trillion in client assets in the second quarter of 2026.

This year has started even stronger. In the first half of 2026, earnings per share reached $6.90, up about 46% from a year earlier.

Here's what the last ten years looked like.

As of October 1, this stock yielded 2.4%.

Plenty of income investors would see that number and move on. That number hides most of the story.

Look at the table again. The dividend grew from 70 cents a share in 2016 to $3.85 last year, about 21% a year. This summer, the board raised the quarterly rate again, by 15 cents to $1.15.

So why is the yield still modest? Because the share price compounded too. It's about 5.9 times what it was ten years ago.

Over those ten years, the firm also bought back about $53 billion of its own stock. Even after issuing new shares to buy E*TRADE, its diluted share count fell about 16%.

The dividend is one part of it. The growth of the business behind the dividend is the rest.

And the dividend has plenty of cover. Last year's $3.85 a share used about 38% of earnings per share.

Markets drive a big share of the results. Nearly half of revenue comes from trading, advising on deals and underwriting, and those rise and fall with markets. Earnings per share fell about 35% from 2021 to 2023.

Regulators also set how much capital the firm must hold. That limits how much it can return to shareholders, and the rules can change.

Even wealth management fees are tied to the value of client assets. A long bear market would shrink them.

Then there's the price. Results are at records, and investors can see them. A share price that assumes more record years leaves little room for an ordinary one.

This firm has been tested before, over 91 years. It began when a law split a famous bank in two. It came through 2008 on a paper check, cut its dividend to a nickel, and rebuilt it to $1.15 a quarter. And the army of brokers it added along the way now brings in nearly half its revenue.

Think you know? Hit reply and tell us your guess. We read every reply.

Subscribers to The Dividend Record Portfolio can see the answer right below. They'll also see whether it's one of our 25 holdings this quarter, and the numbers behind the story: where a decade of returns actually came from, how well the dividend is covered, what today's price assumes, and how the stock has held up when the market fell apart.