The word stress doesn't appear in Antonio Miranda's vocabulary. The managing director of debt capital markets for Warburg Dillon Read is super-relaxed as he explains deals and makes philosophical observations while showing Euromoney around the firm's cavernous new premises in Stamford, Connecticut. Looking out over the trading floor, which resembles a giant aircraft hangar, he remarks: "In 100 years' time people will look back on this [way of working] like they do now on the industrial revolution. They'll feel pity that we didn't know infra-red rays from computers were slowly poisoning us. They'll wonder how we could have been so naive."
Unaware of the plight Miranda has sketched for them, the 900 or so workers carry on with their business and no riots break out. Then, stopping to admire a picture by the Japanese artist Yukinori Yanagi in which ants are destroying a huge sand replica of a US dollar bill, Miranda comments: "It seems appropriate art for a house winning euro business."
The pride of Miranda's deal portfolio is the €400 million, seven-year bond brought for Mexico last September jointly led with Paribas, making it the first non-European sovereign to tap this market.