"When I’m asked what I want my legacy to be when I finally leave Royal Bank, I say that any time a chief executive starts talking about his legacy it’s time to sell the shares"
Gordon Nixon, president and chief executive of Royal Bank of Canada, keeps his focus firmly on growing his business rather than his own reputation (see Nixon takes RBC into the big league)
"The pendulum in equity capital markets is shifting to the big universal banks. We’re doing these large ECM deals because we are a provider of finance and capital, with a big, strong balance sheet, and we have good bankers"
Stuart Gulliver, chairman of Europe, Middle East and global businesses at HSBC, explains his bank’s sudden success in gaining prime equity mandates
(see Investment banking: HSBC builds a force to be reckoned with)
"We are not taking risk. We define ourselves as a complex accounting operation rather than a custodian. We are infrastructure and operations"
Joe Antonellis, State Street’s vice chairman, gives a rather startling appraisal of his bank’s activities
(see The case against State Street)
"We’re noisy people. It’s very focused, it’s high energy, it’s fairly aggressive. We’re certainly a straight-shooting bunch of people"
Alex Thursby, ANZ’s chief executive for Asia-Pacific, Europe and America, doesn’t mince his words while describing the bank’s push for market share in Asia
(see ANZ shoots straight for Asia)
"There are probably a lot of loans out there that none of us – not even the Chinese government – knows about"
Victor Shih, a professor at Northwestern University, on the known unknowns resulting from China’s $600 billion stimulus spree