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In the early 1990s Budapest was a good place to be for an ambitious investment banker. Hungary’s privatization programme was in full swing, and western investors were queuing up to buy into central Europe’s most developed economy. But capitalism had its downsides, as one young investment banker discovered.
“One night we were working late on a transaction and one of my junior colleagues said to me: ‘You know, when they told us about democracy and the market economy, they said we’d be able to buy the same products as in Vienna. Nobody said anything about working until two o’clock in the morning’,” recalls András Simor, who was head of Creditanstalt’s Budapest operation at the time.
Simor himself had been bitten with the capitalist bug more than a decade earlier, when he arrived in London in 1979 for a six-year spell at Hungarian International Bank.
