During the roadshow the news from emerging markets was bad. Indonesia’s troubles raged on and India and Pakistan were engaged in a nuclear stand-off. Moctar Fall, head of Chase’s capital markets international fixed income, and his team decided to wait before launching an issue for BNDES, the Brazilian development bank.
But the situation did not improve, Russia’s troubles grew worse and so did Japan’s. These events had nothing to do with Brazil but they made the market environment for emerging-market credits choppy.
Eventually the deal could be put off no longer and Fall was confident it could be done using a resettable coupon with the Brazil 08 as the reference bond. Fall’s faith was vindicated when the deal came and was increased from $750 million to $1 billion.
“It got everyone’s attention,” says Fall, who joined Chase in early 1997 after a decade at Salomon Brothers where he gained notoriety with sovereign and multilateral deals such as the first global bond for the World Bank for $1.5 billion.
Success in finance was furthest thing from his mind when he was younger. The son of an engineer, Fall left his home in Senegal intending to follow in his father’s footsteps. He studied engineering in France and later at MIT and his passion was for solar energy which he saw as a panacea for Africa’s development problems. Along the way he realized that engineering challenges were easier to solve than financial ones and his efforts would be better directed at the latter.
He describes his style as “aggressive but well-meaning as opposed to arrogant and obnoxious. Sometimes I get passionate about things, and I hate to lose, whether it’s a 100-million deal or a two-billion deal.”
But Fall is clearly a guy with considerable inner resources who bounces back quickly from defeat. On his office walls are serene black and white, framed photographs of deserts and landscapes of which Fall is the originator. “It’s been said that a landscape photographer is an optimist because he seeks out beauty and shares it,” he says and this seems to characterize Fall.
“I am always in a good mood and I don’t let things bother me. Maybe it’s because of my background. I have seen poor people and rich people and everything in between.”
