Off the Record
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LATEST ARTICLES
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A friend of the outgoing UniCredit CEO is sceptical about him taking on the top job back at his old shop
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This investment banker believes the importance of having relationship business all the way down the corporate ladder is limited when it comes to winning lucrative advisory mandates
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An HSBC insider reacts to news that Mark Tucker, chief executive of Hong Kong-based insurer AIA, will be the next chairman of the bank
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A top executive at a leading European bank questions the credibility of the firm’s new leadership [March]
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One PR chief goes coy on the prospects of a traditionally convivial night during the IMF meetings after a recent change in senior management
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Both tasks suggested by this banker seem equally impossible at this stage, to be honest
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The chairman of one of the world’s biggest banks apologises for the size of his company’s annual report, which his PR chief had just handed to us
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After a tour of the leading lights of Silicon Valley, this bank CEO wasn’t so sure tech giants like Apple and Amazon really wanted to become banks
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The CEO of one leading European bank has some sympathy for peers that are struggling to deliver positive results for their banks, and thereby raising questions about their futures
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A top executive at a leading European bank questions the credibility of the firm’s new leadership
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“He’s got an important client meeting in Australia. He’s setting off tomorrow”
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“I’m absolutely delighted. He once told the CEO in a management committee meeting that he was like a second father to him. We all wanted to be sick”
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"It’s got nothing to do with the market. It’s the fact that our f***ing governments haven’t got their f***ing acts together to make the necessary f***ing planning to address climate change and have spent 20 years p***ing in the wind wasting our money on lawyers in Paris"
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Digital technology is set to change banking fundamentally in the years ahead. Euromoney has been writing about this a lot, while quietly wondering what it might do with a dollar for every time a grey-haired senior banker solemnly asserts it. Hence, no doubt, the email that pings into our inbox from Silicon Valley, promoting what looks like a new trade-matching or wealth-management service, called MillionaireMatch, which boasts that it runs a ‘no riff raff policy’. Quite right too, in this era of endless fines for market rigging and other offences.
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“I keep telling him to grow a set of balls. I really shouldn’t be talking to my CEO like that”
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“I have had meetings with any number of start-up direct-lending platforms, and although I think there is a small need for them, the vast majority of them are total bullshit and a crisis waiting to happen”
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"Why not just give us one piece of paper saying banks can’t trade fixed income derivatives on a non-clearable basis?"
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“If you take into account the deals that people took a run at but didn’t get over the line there has been a staggering increase in activity”
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“Do not make any moves. You have been spotted”The slightly alarming message that popped up onto a blank screen when one of our correspondents tried to log in the press centre website of the Ukrainian Ministry of Economy & Trade
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“I’ve got tickets for the world cup final. My boss was on the phone asking me about that and I told him that it was a client event I had booked in six years ago. It was probably a mistake. He pointed out that I didn’t work here six years ago”
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"Emerging markets to investors are a bit like bankers to taxi drivers — not exactly flavour of the month."
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"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"
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"What’s the future for dealer-to-client platforms? They’re going to go the same way as dealer chatrooms"
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“The deal has held up very well; it is trading at 17, 18, OK let’s call it 20”
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"The price was absolutely ludicrous and people were openly asking if the old man had finally lost it"
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"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"
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"If you think I’ve got someone peeling grapes for me and popping them in my mouth, then you’re sadly mistaken"
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“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
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“When you are getting 6% in high yield, something somewhere has gone horribly wrong” An investor doesn’t like what he sees in credit
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"[Gallic shrug with arms fully extended to the side and look of bemusement and disdain]"
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"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"
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"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"
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"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"
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"The problem for the hedge fund industry is finding alpha, which at the moment is as rare as rocking-horse shit"
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"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"
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"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
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"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"
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"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’"
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"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"
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"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."
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"You shouldn’t automatically take it for granted that the world is going to end"
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"You should give it to us because we are nice and there are an awful lot of pricks in this business"
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"All the planes to Dublin are now full of guys in North Face fleeces and jeans instead of business suits"