Linked in The Room

A corner of LinkedIn was ablaze with nostalgia over the weekend of February 23/24 as bank industry veterans flocked to read Euromoney's interview from 1979 with John Gutfreund – at the time managing partner of Salomon Brothers – which we published as part of our exploration of our archive in our 50^th anniversary year. By the Monday morning nearly 11,000 people had viewed the post.

In the 1979 interview the late Padraic Fallon, then editor of Euromoney, described Gutfreund as the world's most famous trader in probably the world's most famous trading room. And judging by the comments alongside the post in LinkedIn, there were plenty who agreed with that verdict.

Members of the Salomon diaspora were the most effusive. "Those were the days!" wrote one. Another, who went through the training programme there in 1983, described it as a magical environment. 

"They just don't make them like him any more" and "one of the true legends", wrote others of Gutfreund himself. It was a time and a firm that "shaped careers and changed lives", wrote another.

"The smell of John's omnipresent cigar smoke will be ingrained in my mind forever," wrote Peter Lewis, now managing director at Kohesiv and who joined Salomon in 1986.