"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"
This bond market veteran warns that bond fund portfolio managers today don’t understand how to manage for risk, only for return
"If I’d have been successful, I’d never have got into this business – I’d be swanning around with Bill Clinton telling people how to solve world hunger while busily avoiding tax"
One banker wonders what might have happened if his career had taken a different path
"It’s all been about lobbying, petitions, telling people how shit Larry Summers is"
A supporter of Janet Yellen’s candidacy for the Fed chair explains their strategy
"We’ve got lots of capital, funding and liquidity. Those are not our problems: our problem is finding revenue. We are under-lent and competing aggressively on price for assets"
Companies complaining about withdrawal of bank lending need to talk to this banker
"There’s far too much liquidity and banks are lending on terms that are probably too generous in the fanciful hope of winning ancillary business from corporates. We recently had a relationship borrower asking us for 20-year money. When we said we couldn’t do that, the borrower said: ‘That’s fine, we’ve got five other banks that will’"
For this banker, the syndicated loan market has gone back to the future