Increasingly however, bankers want to be seen as human beings and not as money machines. I was amused that even Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, is keen to portray a cuddlier image. In March, Blankfein appeared on CBS’s evening news programme espousing the cause of gay marriage.

April 2013 marks my seventh anniversary with Euromoney. During that time, I have watched, sometimes awe-struck, sometimes gobsmacked, developments in the financial markets. I have written about big banks, hedge funds, asset managers and the twists and turns of politics at these institutions.

In late March, a memorial service was held for Padraic Fallon, the former chairman of Euromoney Institutional Investor, the company that owns Euromoney magazine. Padraic died much too young, at the age of 66, after a battle with cancer.

Trying to change cultures within banking institutions is never easy, which is why Barclays’ new chief executive is taking a hard and seemingly Soviet-era approach at the UK bank. The message is clear: Barclays would now like to be seen as a stodgy commercial bank run by a proselytizing Brit.

Ever since Banco Santander was named Euromoney’s bank of the year for 2012, I have been keeping a wary eye on the Spanish lender, which is also Europe’s largest bank. The share price bottomed at approximately €4 around the time of the award. This was the same level reached in March 2009. Since last July, Santander shares rose, phoenix-like, to nearly €6.50 in late January 2013, before falling back a bit. Interestingly, the chart of Santander’s stock price is similar to that of the overall Spanish market (the IBEX 35) which is probably not surprising.

I am rapidly becoming an African aficionado. Maybe Barclays’ Jenkins is on the right track in targeting Africa as a key region of growth for Barclays. A mole was at the recent South African mining conference Indaba in Cape Town and reports record attendance and a febrile atmosphere of deal-making.

I would like to refrain from carping from the sidelines, but I can’t help myself. Is there not the tiniest bit of hypocrisy in Saint Antony’s finger-wagging? After all, Jenkins was a close colleague of his now unpopular predecessor, Bob Diamond. Before ascending to the chief executive throne, Jenkins ran Barclays’ retail and business banking division. He was appointed to this role in November 2009 and thus became caught up in the tail end of the payment protection insurance scandal. Banks were found to have been selling insurance to clients who had no need of it. To date, Barclays has set aside some £2.6 billion to compensate customers.

"Your e-mail on all these once-upon-a-time masters of the universe, crammed into a first-class cabin, made me laugh. It’s like a rock band who are now a bit past their prime but still want to be loved."

In January, we received news that Jes Staley, the former head of JPMorgan’s investment bank, was leaving the firm to join the hedge fund BlueMountain Capital. This story has several interesting aspects.

In the post-credit-crunch world it is clear that there is a role for a trusted adviser, away from the big firms with all their inherent conflicts of interest. However, there are now a lot of smaller corporate finance firms, so it might be hard to find a niche in this new competitive landscape.

Over in big bad bank land, the going remains tough. Morgan Stanley was the latest bank to announce big job losses. In January, the firm initiated 1,600 job cuts in addition to the large head-count cull that it undertook last year. Apparently, a large number of managing directors and executive directors will be shown the door in both the investment banking and trading areas. No one grieves when an investment banker loses his or her job. But what people are worrying about is a new compensation scheme that Morgan Stanley announced in mid-January whereby employees earning more than $350,000 in total whose bonuses were at least $50,000 would have 100% of their annual bonus deferred over three years. Lower disposable income on Wall Street affects numerous hangers-on lower down the food chain: think estate agents, car dealers, top-end tailors and watchmakers.

"The penny dropped in 2012," a source mused. "It was the year when financiers shed the illusion that their world would come back. In fact, it might be that the years 1998 to 2007 will be viewed as the exception in banking, not the norm."

It was not only banks that endured a tough 2012. As the year drew to a close, some hedge fund managers were also licking their wounds. An insider-trading probe at top US hedge fund SAC Capital is a concern. In late November 2012, the firm said that it might face civil fraud charges from the SEC. Also in 2012, Raj Gupta, a former main board Goldman Sachs director, was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for leaking insider information to his friend, and current prison inmate, Raj Rajaratman, co-founder of the Galleon Group hedge fund. And while we are on the subject of Goldman Sachs, did any devoted readers notice that Pierre-Henri Flamand, the former head of the principal strategies group at the US investment bank, quietly closed his European event-driven hedge fund, Edoma, two years after opening it in London with over $2 billion under management. Investors are said to have been less than enamoured of the former golden boy’s performance after the fund lost some 8% of its value.

Against this opaque backdrop, Deutsche Bank seems to be tripping over its own toenails. I admit that during the financial crisis I was one of the few journalists who was critical of the good ship DB. I didn’t like the fact that shortly after Lehman’s collapse, Deutsche posted a surprise third-quarter profit by reclassifying some €25 billion of trading assets under new accounting rules. I also couldn’t understand how a house that had been so big in complex derivative products did not need to raise more capital – although Deutsche did eventually raise capital in late 2010 in association with the takeover of Deutsche Postbank.

For some reason, the phrase “Denial is not a river in Egypt” resounds in my mind.

Brady Dougan is meant to be an excellent manager and people enjoy working for him.

To the outsider, this reorganization again seems odd.

It was the month, rather than the night, of long knives in investment banking this November.

Sometimes, I am pleased to say, I get there before others. Those who are successful normally spot signals before they become trends and navigate accordingly. I can think of many examples: Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks, who realized people would pay £2.50 for a half decent cup of coffee; Steve Jobs, who saw that consumers wanted design as well as functionality; and even Barack Obama, who recognized in 2008 that the US public were desperate for change. Of course, Obama now faces a difficult re-election battle as it is not clear his tenure delivered the change that he promised.

It’s never quiet in UK banking these days. In a fitting episode of handbags at dawn, Ana Botín, the chief executive of Santander UK, reneged on an agreement to buy 316 branches from RBS. The provisional sale agreement had been signed in the summer of 2010 when António Horta-Osório was running Santander UK. Santander wanted to expand its penetration of the small-business market and was prepared to pay £1.65 billion to do so.

Pandit and Havens used to work at Morgan Stanley. In fact, at one time, Pandit was president of the firm. As James Gorman struggles with John Mack’s legacy, a wild thought crosses my mind. Might Pandit one day return to run his alma mater? Over at Morgan Stanley, Gorman is facing the third anniversary of his ascension to the chief executive throne. And the going has not been easy.

Padraic Fallon, the chairman and editor-in-chief of Euromoney Institutional Investor, was the person who highlighted to me the importance of being first. "Write something new, Abigail," he would say. "Always try to be first with your angle or story. Go out and meet new people."

In late September I attended a fascinating dinner organized by a top money manager who is based in the US. There was a leading American political strategist present who is very well connected in Washington. So I was able to glean some insights into the current state of US politics.

One of the participants at the dinner had also been present at the Federal Reserve’s annual symposium in August at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Mole reported that Bernanke was now wildly unpopular with his central bank colleagues, especially those from the emerging markets. These central bankers perceive the Fed’s infatuation with indefinite QE as a recipe for disaster. A weaker dollar means stronger emerging market currencies, which in turn makes exports more expensive. A weaker dollar also increases the price of key commodities such as oil and grains, and this makes for a febrile political environment as the poor suffer more.

As Fisher gets hot under the collar, many investment bankers are starting to shiver in their boots. A theme of this column for several years now has been that most big investment banks are vastly overstaffed and in denial about the need to cut jobs and costs. When UBS announced their newest ‘new strategy’ in November 2011 – a supposed response to the unauthorized Kwaku Adoboli trading loss – I criticized the bank on the grounds that the action was not drastic enough. I remember a conversation where I reiterated that view to a senior UBS banker. Although courteous, the senior banker obviously thought I was exaggerating and that the industry would continue to chug along with slightly diminished staffing and compensation levels. But now it seems the great train ride might indeed be over. An email crossed my desk recently and the author, a head-hunter, bemoaned the "lean pickings" in the fixed-income, commodity and currency world. "It all looks bleak," hunter wailed. He went on to speak about bonus pools being savaged by 30% to 80% this year and job cuts cascading into October. Hunter ended on an unhappy note: "For now, we are seeing very limited new hiring plans." I hear that banks as diverse as Barclays, Deutsche, Credit Suisse, UBS, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Nomura and BNP might all reduce headcount before the year-end. In other words, we will see industry-wide cutbacks. Economic forecaster CEBR predicts that in 2013 there will be only 250,000 investment bankers in the City of London, 100,000 fewer than five years ago and the lowest number since 1996. I don’t mean to be brutal but my reaction would be: "That’s more like it!"

This was the summer when many of the chickens that the Abigail with attitude column has been husbanding came home to roost.

As a Brit and career retail banker with a long and successful history at Barclays, Antony Jenkins may be seen in some quarters as the perfect successor to Bob Diamond as chief executive. For one market commentator in particular however, Jenkins is an unknown quantity whose suitability is questionable.

The received wisdom is that if Morgan Stanley gets into too much trouble, Mitsubishi will step in to save it. Will that still be the case now that Nomura’s grandiose international project has ended with a whimper?

Increasingly, I am noticing that while bank chief executives have to be seen in public, heads of investment banks are trying to keep a very low profile.

The firm might be stuck in the middle with nowhere to go: it is neither a global, bulge-bracket player nor a focused, low-cost, niche operator.