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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"
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Euromoney: "What is it about your client’s economic fundamentals that make it such a compelling story?"
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“The sovereign always wins. Someone has to pay the sovereign bill and it is always the corporates – you can’t take on the house”
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"I got an email from a superior asking if I thought it was a good deal. I gave a two-letter answer. Suffice to say the industry is stunned"
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“They’ve simultaneously pulled off one of the most lucrative investments of all time, and crystallized a long-running missed opportunity. So, yes...tough one to evaluate”
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"It’s getting to the point where clients are looking not at which banks would be good to run the deal but which will lie to them best"
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"That deal was an ambulance-chasing, low fee, beauty parade ordeal, which we were very happy to do for the league table credit"
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"The worst thing is the uncertainty. Just give us a set of rules and then we’ll figure out how to work round them... I mean work with them"
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"You don’t get it. No one can fly. What do you want me to do? Go over there and blow it away?"
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"The biggest mistake Dick Fuld ever made in his career was not working for Goldman Sachs"
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"I would rather invest in a five-times levered company with no refinancing requirement than a two-times levered company that needs to refinance"
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"I’m afraid he’s on gardening leave and could be for a while. You should see the size of this guy’s garden. I think it’s called Buckinghamshire"
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"Where I live its not very commutable so there aren’t many bankers around. I go to dinner and I’m instantly disparaged. You know: Banker, American, paedophile..."
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"It’s all very well looking at league tables this year, but you have to realize that one of those at the top was standing there with a gun to the clients’ heads. I think we all know who"
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"They want us to take away the bull. They want us to put up the flag. I hate that fucking flag"
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"It’s not the quantum of what we pay people that’s changed. It’s the shape of the payments"
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"If I was Bob Diamond I’d offer to pay Fred Goodwin’s pension because if he hadn’t bought ABN Amro, all the senior Barclays guys would be out of a job"
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"I’ve no interest in Davos. I don’t know how they keep the snow from melting with all the hot air. What has Davos ever achieved except perpetuating the belief among participants that they are so very special?"
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"I was going through passport control and they asked me the purpose of my visit and what I did. For the first time in my career, I thought "I can’t say I’m a banker, I’ve got to say something else – maybe I can tell them that I’m a doctor."
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"This is worse then a divorce – I’ve lost half my net worth but I still have my wife!"
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"I remember going into the Fed for meetings on the LTCM rescue plan. At one end of the table there was Jimmy Cayne, at the other Dick Fuld. Now the table is a lot smaller and the faces are not so familiar"
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"We have all the signs of emerging markets in the US now – there’s stagflation, growing unemployment, excess debt, poor monetary management – I just wonder when the US will be included in the EMBI+"
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"The problem is that banks have ended up lending to these deals by accident – they thought that they were underwriting them"
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"It is very hard to distinguish a catastrophe CDO from any other type of CDO in this market – aren’t all CDOs catastrophes?"
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Banker: "We looked at SG, but the integration would have been very difficult and, in any case, the French don’t like to sell to foreigners"
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"Richard Branson likes to make out he’s Robin Hood when in fact he’s more like the Sheriff of Nottingham"
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"I was talking to a Merrill Lynch banker the other day who said he wanted his firm to be like Goldman Sachs. I replied: ‘But you’re not.’ It’s like saying you want to be cool when you’re not"
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"This is the leather room, which we reserve for our more intimate client relationships"
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"Interest rate cuts will be like Viagra – an artificial stimulus that doesn’t cure the underlying problem"
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"Having been a customer of your bank for more than 10 years, I find it difficult to describe any of you services as excellent. Another good example of SBM’s excellence in customer care I believe is the underground parking at your Vacoas branch. The parking used to be available for customers. However since a few months back customers no longer have access to it, as it seems that it is reserved for the exclusive use of the branch employees!! So much for customer sovereignty"
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"OK, so I screwed up. Even my COO called me up and said: "Great pitch mate, really compelling – shame about the logo on the top of the page"
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"He’d been my client for 30 years, and he invited me down to see him at his home in Florida. When I got there he had assembled his entire family – wife, children, grandkids, the lot. I sat down. He handed me a letter and asked me to read it out loud to the room. It said simply: ‘Dear Bob, In the event that I should pass away, please tell my wife exactly what she needs to do, and ensure that she does it’"
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“I guess if Goldman Sachs can’t even read our P/E off a screen then the chances of them being good at the rest of the numbers is pretty low!”
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“The share price hasn’t moved for a decade. Working for Citigroup has put an extra five years onto my working life. You make a pact with the devil when you work for an investment bank, I know, but you at least expect him to keep his side of the bargain!” One disgruntled Citigroup banker bemoans having his retirement plans indefinitely delayed
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“Take your pick as to which of these versions you prefer to believe:
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“We’ve got samurais, kangaroos and bulldogs – now what we really need is a name for all these bonds coming out of Kazakhstan...”
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“When you talk about leasing, everyone thinks you’re talking about cars. My mother-in-law thinks I sell cars for a living”
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“When we were marketing our Asia hedge fund five years ago, one head of a large US fund of hedge funds observed: ‘Shanghai, eh? I bet you get great sushi there’”
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“Is that ABN Amro doing badly? I noticed they’re using a minicab firm. It’s always a sign that a bank’s in trouble when they use minicabs rather than licensed cabs”
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Euromoney Awards for excellence 2006
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“Citigroup should wipe the floor with everyone in credit derivatives. What happened?”
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“I was meant to buy a new house today. All the financing was in place. Everything was agreed. Then a Russian turned up with a bag of cash and gazumped me. My wife’s not very happy.”
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“OK, if there were a big credit event, and if it coincided with one of the dealers going down, there would be a problem. How many ‘ifs’ do they want?”
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“It’s nearly impossible to say which one you would choose when they go head to head in a pitch for passive mandates. They’re 10-ton gorillas that joust at the top.”
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“I have 18 proposals from different banks all offering the same type of deal. When you pile them one on top of the other they stand over a metre high. I am suffering from lead harassment”
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"Listen, I'm one of the biggest risk managers in Europe. I run a credit risk book of over €60 billion. By comparison most funds are little pussies."
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"£875m for The Priory! Why buy it? Maybe they have a view on the secular growth in the bulimic market"
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"This is the best year without a doubt. We are not in the charity business, right? We are doing this to make money and you can rest assured we are very successful in our business." -An unnamed banker making one of the more aggressive – and honest – pitches for a Euromoney Award for Excellence
