O'Neal was regarded as out of touch as the market changed and Merrill steered towards trouble, as he had "become isolated from his own firm. He had no idea that key risk managers had been pushed aside or that the people he had put in important positions were out of their depth". O'Neal was described as a manager who "had never been the kind of C.E.O. who walked the trading floor. By 2006, he was so divorced from his own firm that he failed to appreciate the utter lunacy of Semerci’s desire to clean house. Did he really think Semerci could get rid of Merrill’s most experienced mortgage traders and not harm the mortgage desk? Sadly, it seems that O’Neal didn’t think about it at all." "At the same time Goldman executives were canceling vacations to deal with the burgeoning subprime crisis, O’Neal was often on the golf course, playing round after round by himself", in fact six months before Bear Stearns nearly collapsed Merril added tens of billions of risky securities to its balance sheet while Goldman moved to reduce exposure.