Carla Harris began her career at Morgan Stanley in 1987 and rose steadily through the ranks to become one of the most powerful and senior Black women on Wall Street. She joined Morgan Stanley after graduating from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree and an MBA. She began her career as an investment banker in the Mergers & Acquisitions division.
She then rose through the ranks to become the firm’s Managing Director of Global Capital Markets, where she was in charge of the structure, marketing, and execution of public and private equity financings. After more than a decade, she became a senior member of the Equity Syndicate desk, where she executed transactions such as initial public offerings for UPS, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and the $3.2 billion common stock transaction for Immunex Corporation, the largest biotechnology follow-on offering in U.S. history.
When Harris first joined Wall Street, it was dominated by White men, and the status quo has remained mostly unchanged. Morgan Stanley’s 2020 diversity report stated that 23 of its executives in 2018 were Black males and 14 were Black women. Another diversity report commissioned in 2020 found that 16 of the 1,056 executives were Black men and 18 were Black women.
“It didn’t terrify me,” she said of the lack of diversity on Wall Street when she first arrived. “You choose what you saw at Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs.” So you knew that if you wanted to play on this field, you’d have to be okay with being the only and the first in some situations. That was not at all intimidating to me. That was exactly how it was.”
She announced her resignation as Morgan Stanley’s vice chairman of wealth management in 2021. She is now the firm’s senior client adviser. Harris wanted to be a lawyer when she first arrived at Harvard because she admired Perry Mason and enjoyed arguing her case. “Everyone in my family told me, ‘You’re going to be a lawyer,'” she explained to Bloomberg.
She was then exposed to finance and discovered that what she assumed was contained in the law was actually found in finance. She went on to say that she discovered that business people truly called the shots, and lawyers just assisted get things done within the confines of the law.
“I wanted a lot of responsibility from the beginning,” she told Bloomberg. “I was 19 years old and there I was, actually working on analysis and spreadsheets that people were using to make decisions about issuing millions of dollars of bonds.”
“And, you know, I wanted to make a lot of money. And I certainly realized in finance people could do that. The other thing that was attractive is I am negatively motivated. So when you tell me I can’t do something, I was all over it. And I really did not see a lot of people of color and I didn’t see very many women. Why not? It’s not like this is that hard,” she added.
Harris began singing at a young age, having been born on October 28, 1962, in Port Arthur, Texas, and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. When she was 13, she began singing in both Catholic and Baptist choruses. She continued to sing while attending Harvard University. She performed with the world-renowned Radcliffe Chorale Society, Harvard’s oldest women’s singing group, as well as her own band, Rhythm Company.