“When you are getting 6% in high yield, something somewhere has gone horribly wrong” An investor doesn’t like what he sees in credit
“All hedge funds really do is simply write puts on the S&P500. This masquerades as alpha until the market crashes and then it starts to look a lot like beta”
Hedge fund investors are usually paying two-and-twenty for beta performance, claims this banker
“They don’t have to be likeable. The press doesn’t get this. They just have to make a lot of money for investors”
An analyst on what makes good bank CEOs
“Morgan Stanley’s beginning to look a bit like Arsenal. When you keep losing your top people and fail to replace them with similar talent, then eventually you’re going to struggle to stay in the Champions League places”
A former employee of the US investment bank says it’s paying the penalty for a recent talent drain
“International banks in Thailand pay their receptionists more than they pay their underwriters”
A Bangkok-based banker explains why international banks based in Thailand barely get a piece of the equity capital markets action
“Dictators... Muslim insurgency... Imelda Marcos’s extensive shoe collection. All people used to hear out of the Philippines was bad news”
All that’s changed now, says a senior banker at a Philippines-based bank
“No country is an island”
A Filipino official describes the Philippine islands
“The stock exchange in Myanmar is quite developed. It currently consists of seven people, a white board and a marker pen”
Things are better than expected in a neighbouring country, says an equity banker in Thailand