Merrill Lynch ousted CEO and Chairman Stan O’Neal today, making him the highest-profile casualty of the subprime meltdown, reports Reuters.

His ouster follows last week’s report of a record $2.3 billion quarterly loss and write down of $8.4 billion.

Some analysts expect the investment bank to write down an additional $5 billion.

Here’s more from Reuters:

The world’s biggest brokerage said board member Alberto Cribiore will serve as interim nonexecutive chairman while day-to-day operations will be overseen by Merrill’s current co-presidents, Ahmass Fakahany and Greg Fleming. Cribiore, founder of private equity firm Brera Capital, will chair a search committee to find a permanent successor to O’Neal. The committee will look inside and outside the company, Merrill said in a statement.

Fleming’s duties include oversight of company risk management, a task previously associated with Fakahany, who the company said will lead global support, finance and human resource functions.

To read the full Reuters piece CLICK HERE.

Merrill once looked at buying defunct subprime lender New Century Financial in Irvine. In the end it passed on New Century and bought three units of National City Corp.: First Franklin, a subprime lender headquartered in San Jose, National Home Loan Services in Pittsburgh and NationPoint, an online mortgage lender in Lake Forest.

(Note: I meant to post on this earlier today, but we have been having trouble with the blog software. The IT folks say it’s all fixed. Sorry for the Internet hiccups.)