“The prime-minister designate asked me: ‘Are you refusing to serve your country?’ Something inside me said ‘Look, go, give it a try’”
Samir Radwan on the surprise call that changed his life and led him to become Egypt’s finance minister during the heat of the Egyptian revolution
(see Egypt’s reluctant finance minister gets to work)
“It’s not the right time to put out explicit return targets. Right now for 2011 we are in a window where none of the new rules apply and a lot of initial analysis is being done trying to apply Basle 2.5 and Basle III to banks’ existing models rather than reworked balance sheets. Such profitability calculations may be rather premature”
Stefan Krause, Deutsche Bank’s CFO, explains why it’s so hard for banks to give guidance on their earnings
(see Banking isn’t working)
“Big M&A transactions are very distracting and time consuming. If you have the right ones, they are worth doing, but in our case we have a very robust growth strategy to grow our core business globally”
The CME’s Craig Donohue is poacher turned gamekeeper on the playing field of exchange consolidation
(see CME’s Donohue unmoved by exchange consolidation)
“If I had signed that piece of paper, it would probably have meant the end of my company”
Kang Hoon Lee, head of Korea’s M Corporation, is thankful that he did not enter into KiKo trades. Others weren’t so lucky
(see Derivatives: Korea still reeling from knock-out blows)