Glenn Grossman doesn’t have a lot of good words for banking consolidation. “Each year the party gets better and attendance improves, and each year we raise less money,” he says.
Grossman founded New York’s annual Emerging Markets Benefit for Children’s Charities after attending a similar ball in London. From his position as an executive at Cantor Fitzgerald, he persuaded six banks to pony up $50,000 each as underwriters, and another four to part with $25,000 as sponsors. The evening ended up raising some $700,000.
This year, the number of underwriters and sponsors had dwindled to four: JP Morgan, Deutsche, BNP Paribas and ING Barings. The total amount raised, despite a record number of tables sold at $10,000 each, was $490,000.
But as the amount raised falls, the importance of the event in the emerging-markets calendar increases. “In previous years, there were bank-sponsored Christmas parties, but they no longer exist,” says co-chair Mary Moglia, of BNP Paribas. “It’s the only time when bank clients, investor clients, broker-dealers and inter-dealer brokers all show up to the same place.”
The resultant mingling drowned out the charity auction, in which the buy side proved itself much more willing to part with personal money than the sell side was.
The festivities also raised the wine bill significantly above what the organizers had budgeted for, and even left one bank facing a threatened lawsuit from servers aggrieved at its employees’ raucous behaviour. So much for seasonal good will.
But while JP Morgan’s David Sekiguchi stunned partygoers with his golden tie and slick moves on the dance floor, a few intrepid traders lost little time in realizing that the real action was downstairs. The ball was held in an upstairs ballroom at Manhattan Center, the prime attraction of which is the massive Hammerstein Ballroom. And on the night of the emerging-markets benefit, the Hammerstein Ballroom had been transformed into a tropical paradise for the MTV Networks Holiday Party 2000.
There, waiter-baiting tuxedo-clad dealers received some kind of justice: they found that the cost of crashing the MTV party was being mistaken for waiters themselves by the dressed-down hipster crowd.
