It happened last week. JJ Ingersoll, our head of global focus, jostled onto the trading floor in a grim mood, and walked up to Chip Roach our top mortgage-backed deal junkie. There was the mischief of Loki in his eyes as JJ asked him what was the prepayment risk on the sub-interest flurbi-wurbs he heard he’d bought at the used car lot. Chip wasn’t taking that bullshit from anyone. He replied, fine, I can tell you that, but let’s up the stakes. He would only de-flurb his position in wurbs if JJ could assess the value at risk of the firm’s soda machine which was currently taking dimes without dispensing cans. JJ looked over at the machine currently in default slammed his manhood on the desk and proceeded to ask Chip to mark his portfolio to market.
There were gasps. Our worldwide trading network came to a standstill. Pins dropped from Tokyo to Reykjavik. A couple of clients died in a hedge. Then the sound of footsteps as Ace Iceberg, our chairman, walked in, clad only in a pair of fine brown brogues and a tight pair of synthetic leather Lederhosen. Nobody thought he would dare, but they knew he would and he did he challenged the two to value the size of his pension contribution. If they failed they both owed him a sum of money equal to Greenland’s GDP.
Gasps fluttered as he flicked his yo-yo from the hip, and slammed his wodge on the desk too. The three wodges competed for space and silence shouted from the rafters almost in defiance of any of them actually giving any answers. It was like the ultimate dare, and then Mavis the sandwich lady came in.
It’s called Asshole’s Roulette, and it was invented at our firm we’re proud of it.
Eighty-eight seconds later they all put their wodges away, the bonding exercise complete, all three reinvigorated like young stags, totally satisfied that this shoulder-to-shoulder confrontation put the firm back in the bulge bracket where it belonged.
And then business as usual with a series of screams from John “Baby Joe” Jakovitch, king of the squawk-box. At 11am a figure from the Fed was announced for inflationary patterns. “Geez guys, the underlyings gettin in the way of the overlying.”
At 11.10 a figure from the Fed on how children in the womb perceived the economy “Geez guys, we got some pretty unhappy foetuses out there with consumption down in the second quarter. Seems they were rattled by the higher than expected jobless numbers.”
Then the snow report. Luckily it was good. “Geez guys. Perfect conditions.”
Two metres of fresh snow in the French Alps put us all in a good mood. There was no thought of hitting the piste until those nice machines had ironed out the nasty sub-Libor wrinkles. We’re busy entertaining clients in the purpose-built chalet village of Trop Belle pour Toi by the exclusive Lac-rien de Luxe, with its celebrated Bottom-Line Masssage Parlour. JJ and I have 23 top clients in tow, and kick off as is the custom by informing our guests that we’ve already put up collateral against selected wines from the cellar, so they can feel free to order whatever they like.
Once again we have some of the most important borrowers in Europe sporting their salopettes. There’s Jean-Luc Chateauneufdupape, head of the Kingdom of Cades, Dieter Hüttenfabrik, head of the German steel bosses’ severance fund, and Giovanni de Trattori, funding chief and reserve goalkeeper for Juventus.
These skiing trips are a great way to oil the mandate business, and give us a chance to arrange information-sharing experiences about our global capabilities. Obviously these are counterproductive if they are too long or dull. But we’ve got it down to a fine art, 14 seconds maximum the attention span of the benchmark client and last year we worked on a subliminal strategy. The clients watched a short film with Claudia Schiffer guesting as a corset-linked structure who walked and talked in some of the most difficult bedroom scenes the market has ever witnessed. We called the movie Lead me to sin and an appropriate mtn strategy.
This year we have gone one further. We have hired the Ecole de ski française and trained them in the exotic derivatives sales techniques that we have tried and tested on some the most sophisticated clients in the world Japanese housewives. Which client can fail to be persuaded by an instructor in his smart red all-in-ones offering them a product and a treatment tailor-made to their special requirement? We’ve even codified the products green, blue, red, black and piste fermée.
On green we figure the clients will be looking for some minor excitement some marginal yield pick-up while they cruise behind fat German grandmothers and children in snappy little snowplough positions. Then we pitch them a new high-octane structure called TNT which is so exciting you’d have to be on a life-support machine not to feel like Luc Alphand. It triggers a couple of mini-avalanches and links itself to a couple of sexy variables: Papua New Guinean interest-rate volatility, and the look of glumness on Alan Greenspan’s face. If you miss the trend you can lose your principals, and be forced to support Italy’s intellectual right to be a founder member of the new euro. Not for the faint-hearted.
On red we suspect clients will seek to be challenged by intermittent mogul fields calling for therapeutic 90-year, non-call five, debt from Russian municipal sewerage companies.
The pièce de résistance is where our instructors use their local knowledge to trigger major avalanches and rockfalls to cascade dangerously among the borrowers. At that point we offer them the safety and security of a public Eurobond, led solely by ourselves.
The strategy seems to be working because our pipeline of deals looks very full over dinner. The poor skiers asks if we know whether Alan Greenspan’s wedding will cheer him up; and the real show-offs suggest names for the syndicate in their upcoming jumbo bond.
Inevitably bribing the ski school doesn’t come cheap, nor does the training. But this is totally and utterly worth it because at least their sales pitches made at speeds of up to 75 miles an hour against a backdrop of piercing cowbells cannot be picked up by our clients’ sophisticated tape-recording equipment. Not being taped by over-litigious clients is great for the firm’s long-term integrity.
The other great benefit is that JJ and I find time to stop lying to the clients and discover our inner selves in the peace and serenity of some of the finest private banks in the world just across the border.
If only we could open an office here! The sales potential is clearly huge in the high season. Maybe JJ could swing it over another game of Arsehole’s Roulette?
