"He comes in waves"

"Emerging markets to investors are a bit like bankers to taxi drivers — not exactly flavour of the month."

"I never thought for a minute I’d get more of an adrenalin rush from working in regulation than I did on a trading desk"

"What’s the future for dealer-to-client platforms? They’re going to go the same way as dealer chatrooms"

“The deal has held up very well; it is trading at 17, 18, OK let’s call it 20”

"The price was absolutely ludicrous and people were openly asking if the old man had finally lost it"

"The first person to hire me in the 1980s hired me to buy bonds for him because he simply couldn’t take the pain of doing it himself any more. He had been investing in bonds for 10 years and had never seen anything go up"

"Tell them to start buying something, will you?"

"If you think I’ve got someone peeling grapes for me and popping them in my mouth, then you’re sadly mistaken"

"Investors are puking all over that deal"

“Our funding costs will go up. But I’m quite happy to see that and our CDS spreads widen if that’s the price of demolishing the myth that we are dependent on state support” A eurozone bank CEO sees upside from the Cyprus depositor bail-in, although that’s easy to spot at a national champion bank

“When you are getting 6% in high yield, something somewhere has gone horribly wrong” An investor doesn’t like what he sees in credit

"[Gallic shrug with arms fully extended to the side and look of bemusement and disdain]"

"Euromoney is of course the exception here, but I really do get yanked-off with the UK press in particular banging on about the how dead the European IPO market is. It’s not. It’s alive. There are any number of perfectly good companies out there. You just can’t list rubbish"

"I think they’ve gone stark, staring mad"

"I see UBS is targeting a 15% return on equity. I’m not sure that’s so ambitious: 15% of fuck all surely can’t be that hard"

"It’s a minor irritation. We’ve always thought Moody’s was shit, but S&P has now proved it’s just as shit too"

"The problem for the hedge fund industry is finding alpha, which at the moment is as rare as rocking-horse shit"

"Banking is a horrible business – we just haven’t figured out a better way of making sure things are funded. Once we have, then we can get rid of it"

"We have spent the last 12 months focused on advising and executing clients" We were a bit worried when a bank that has radically reduced the number of core clients it covers told us how it was achieving its strategy

"If you call yourself a relative return fund, you need to actually sell things to make that return. Lots of asset managers seem to have forgotten that"

"We’re still trying to come up with a new slogan to replace ‘the world’s local bank’. My favourite so far is ‘we’re all over the place’"

"Aha! You have been eating a beaver!"

"Are you going to write things down?"

"Yes, but it’s been a really good day. And it’s a new year"

"I have told senior management that if they insist on taking multi-billion dollar bonuses this year, they might as well hire a bodyguard because they could end up getting shot"

"Buying up debt from bankrupt countries in the hope that they’ll receive a bailout from other bankrupt countries seemed like a good idea at the time."

"You shouldn’t automatically take it for granted that the world is going to end"

"You should give it to us because we are nice and there are an awful lot of pricks in this business"

"All the planes to Dublin are now full of guys in North Face fleeces and jeans instead of business suits"