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These are serious, ponderous times. So we’re travelling to the firm’s newly created management concept, an annual offsite in Munich, called an Ideas-fest, where jj Ingersoll, our head of global focus, is capable of anything, including a good idea. “The bitch is out to get me,” he confides from the comfort of our soundproof limo, with no-one around to hear but Yin-Li Tattle, Davis More Winmore-Somemore, and Sven “the Mouth” Horliksen. “Surely you meant to say, ‘my favourite colour is blue’,” I suggest, aware that our colleagues can do more damage to a reputation than a dodgy balustrade in California. But jj is referring to Stella de Santos, the firm’s newly recruited head of us and Asian regional focus – incorporating a special mandate for emerging focuses, or blurs. Since the firm hired her from Donaldson Daisy & Laundrette, jj has been edgy – prone to even greater client-driven falsehoods than in normal times. Meanwhile, inside the Ideas-fest we step over a couple of the younger members of staff, creased up, vomiting over something they’ve heard. We look out for Stella, and sure enough there she is, knocking out ideas. Predictably, the colour drains out of jj’s face. Our chairman is dictating a soon-to-be-published memo on why original ideas are good for the bottom-line. “Got any ideas, Ingersoll?” he asks, rocking the cradle with a profit-related yo-yo. jj looks around, and I wonder whether this could be the end – Stella smiling and all. The rest of the firm’s talent is sitting silently on his own, totally idea-ed under the table. Before jj gets a chance to say anything, she walks over to him and strokes his cheek. “I feel that being in the same room as jj is still a privilege,” she gushes. “And you know why? Because he’s been at Black Knight for so long that I know any idea he has is bound to be illegal already. But that shouldn’t prevent us from listening and drawing far-reaching conclusions about why I should manage the bonus pool on my own this year.” She smiles, and winks. I can tell jj is less than happy because his marked-to-market bull-shaped cufflinks are giving off steam. He coughs then suddenly looks pacified, as if a World Bank mandate had descended from the sky. I’m about to feel his pulse when he puts his palms together and switches to a wistful tone. “When I launched Pope Jacob III’s inaugural Eurobond in the first quarter of last year, he told me something: ‘Logicae, my son, I must ringfence the papal vestibule. I have my shareholder to think of.'” “Does this have a point, Ingersoll?” says chairman Ace, looking anything but spiritually satisfied, having just failed to complete a round-the-world manoeuvre with his yo-yo. “It’s just that, well, there I was towelling myself down the other day, when jj Junior came in and, well, I started telling the kid that his global focus needed to be got together – his mid-term results had come back to me via the brokers, and the results weren’t pretty. Not at all. Then he said, gee pop, I wish I could buy a piece of you. You’ve got more client integration in your ass than I got in my little finger. And this got me to thinking, maybe jj Junior’s got a point. I got a big ass and he’s got a little finger, but logic aside, that ain’t a bad idea. “My proposal then, is that our firm, Black Knight, take me off balance sheet and realize its asset. And not just me, but other key employees that we value at their risk. I spoke to James “Pimp-daddy” Fenton, head of fruity trading structures, and he says it’s quite possible, provided I domicile my second and third wives in a triangle over Bermuda in a biplane without much fuel, so as to minimize asset deterioration in the underlying – myself. “Ideally I should live in the Hamptons and commute to the Black Knight Global Tower every day by helicopter, wearing ladies suspenders under my flannels…” Suddenly I realize I’ve heard this stuff before. jj regularly raises these points in his annual appraisal, but I’ve never heard it in the form of a prospectus. Stella pipes up impatiently. “Would it be possible to take jj off balance sheet, sell him to another firm for a 10-year period, and earn fee income on him? Kind of like a repo, but his wife and kids get to see him at weekends?” There is an awed hush like someone just opened the Ark of the Covenant in our corporate finance department, and discovered even it couldn’t rouse them. “Maybe…” says an ever-plucky jj realizing his mistake – forgetting Stella had worked at NaffWest years before, so she was in touch with her irrational side – and decides to completely change tack, “Belgium.” “I’m sorry. Did I hear you right? You want to securitize yourself in Belgium? “Not exactly. But I’ve being thinking a lot about Belgium. It needs non-traditional financing options, and we’re the firm to provide creative solutions. It needs to asset strip itself so it can realize its dream of becoming a province of Germany, or rather a member of the euro – a dream it narrowly failed to realize in 1914. “This time, however, they’re close. They’ve already sold their foreign exchange reserves, which I and others view as a mark of commitment. But thinking more creatively, there are lots of other assets they could liquidate. I scribbled down a couple based on my extensive research of what Americans on the plane knew about Belgium. “Firstly, there are a whole lot of chocolate factories there. And with our firm’s m&m capability, we could probably melt them down, caramelize their balance sheets, and dispose of them individually in yellow and brown bags – legal under certain provisions in Delaware company law, as long as we cut in the midwest candy stores for a piece of the action. If we sell a factory a year amortized over the life of the chocolate when it’s not in a refrigerator, we’ll pay down Belgium’s debt to gdp ratio in two centuries, tops. “In the shorter term we could refuse to allow Hercules Poirot, Belgium’s most famous detective, to solve any more murder mystery cases. Just imagine the consequences. We allow unchaperoned Edwardian widows to be thrown off trains outside Abu Simbel or perhaps down steep crevices in the Ellora Caves. Was it the butler, or the mild-mannered Miss Carruthers, or even Jenkins the balding, pince-nezed central banker, confused about his feelings for his sister and the gold standard? Can the Singapore Monetary Authority condone such unsolved mysteries? I don’t think so – you’ve seen what they’re like with litter and Simex. At the moment he’s a state-owned detective, but if we can just get them to bail out poor Belgium, minus our fee, of course, Hercules will reveal all and go into private hands…” George Glisten, our head of global polish, is headily excited and starts waxing a nearby Bavarian’s head. “Love that concept. Yes, ah, Belgium. Hmm. Where is that?” It’s all too much. I close my eyes and prepare for a long night. For once I actually relish the idea of getting back to work and selling some bonds. |
