Swordfish Research founder and bond market research guru Gary Jenkins promised his regular readers a treat in February. A novel – a romantic comedy to boot – might not be exactly what they had in mind. But that is what he has produced: his first novel, Tom’s Guide Book to Romance, is now available on Amazon.

Wading through the pages and pages of documentation associated with litigation stemming from the sub-prime mortgage crisis always throws up entertaining email exchanges between bankers. The infamous "Boy, that Timberwo[l]f was one shitty deal!" from Goldman Sachs’s Tom Montag has gone down in industry folklore, as have comments from the previously fabulous Fabrice Tourre.

"Scaling down an investment bank, particularly its derivatives positions, is a bit like shutting down a nuclear reactor. That’s something you do only very slowly and by keeping all your best and highest-paid engineers to do it"

UBS and Credit Suisse compete on everything in Switzerland – private banking, corporate accounts, retail clients, you name it.

"Euromoney is of course the exception here, but I really do get yanked-off with the UK press in particular banging on about the how dead the European IPO market is. It’s not. It’s alive. There are any number of perfectly good companies out there. You just can’t list rubbish"

The great and the good of the world descended on Davos in Switzerland for their annual love-in high in the mountains last month. Sage sound bites rolled off the tongues of prime ministers, titans of industry and commentators, cascading down the Alps like an avalanche of strategy.

Justin Bieber has found himself in a sticky situation thanks to MasterCard. In November last year he agreed to endorse the company’s BillMyParents pre-paid card that is aimed at teenagers. In January he announced that he would use his social network machine to endorse the card. Bieber has some 30 million Twitter followers and 48 million Facebook fans. Not all followers and fans are happy with his choice.

Bankers don’t get a lot of love these days. The industry’s annual awards ceremonies have therefore become a very rare opportunity for them to spend an evening relaxing and enjoying themselves without having to pretend to be estate agents.

An issue of this magazine published in 1986 that contained several striking historical markers surfaced at Euromoney’s London headquarters last month. In a year when Liverpool were first-division (precursor of the Premier League) champions, Mike Tyson became world heavyweight champion and crooner Chris be Burgh topped the UK charts with his fantastically cheesy ode to a Lady in Red, Euromoney was writing stories about the birth of Canary Wharf and how stock exchanges were losing business to the telephone market.

1: The number of medals Tajikistan won at the London Olympics. It was a bronze. A women’s boxing bronze. Bravo

Euromoney hopes that, of all bankers, Santa was kind to Stefan Krause and that the chief financial officer of Deutsche Bank had a particularly good Christmas break.

"I think they’ve gone stark, staring mad"

Financial journalists usually spend the last few weeks of the working year doing the rounds of the banks and investors discussing the outlook for the year ahead.

Paypal’s Elon Musk, Microsoft’s Paul Allen and Charles Simonyi, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson – all billionaires associated with investments 62 miles beyond Earth in space. But space is now on the radar of institutional investors and is being pitted as the next great innovation economy.

"Many banks have gone to considerable lengths in recent years to disclose more information about their risks, but the fact remains that investors tend to see banks as opaque black boxes where risks are still poorly disclosed or – worse – actively obscured by management"

"If you look at the behaviour of many banks even last year, they were in denial over the rising cost of funding. They were still doing loss-making loans in the hope of generating a return by cross-selling other services"

It seems the UK is home to the worst snitches when it comes to reporting financial crimes.

"I see UBS is targeting a 15% return on equity. I’m not sure that’s so ambitious: 15% of fuck all surely can’t be that hard"

Some of us have been there before, but all of us have derived a certain childish pleasure from people mistakenly pressing ‘reply all’ to an email, or sending one to everybody asking the most banal of questions. So spare a thought for the hapless Barclays employee who, we presume mistakenly, sent an email recently to the bank’s entire global address book and copied in Sir David Walker, the new chairman, asking about how to book a courier.

These photos show the New York office of Goldman Sachs and Citi’s headquarters at 388 Greenwich Street shortly before the arrival of Hurricane Sandy. Goldman often brags about its superior risk management – on this evidence, it puts its sandbags where its mouth (and door) is. We can only assume that Citi’s token effort signals a more gung-ho approach under newly appointed chief executive Michael Corbat.

Memo to all risk management teams: when a trader that has been working at the bank for eight years asks you to explain what an asset is, call the police. Understood?

"Deals are being oversubscribed by anything ranging from three to four times up to 15 times – and these are for small $100 million deals up to multibillion dollar deals"

"It’s a minor irritation. We’ve always thought Moody’s was shit, but S&P has now proved it’s just as shit too"

If there was ever any doubt about who Wall Street wants in the White House, a cursory glance at the top contributors to the campaigns of president Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney clears that up in a hurry. It might even make the president regret being quite so harsh on a group who backed him pretty heavily (for a Democrat) when he was first elected president after a campaign during which he is thought to have broken the world record for saying: "Yes we can".

The IMF/World Bank meetings in Tokyo produced nothing of note in terms of concerted action to counter the global financial and economic crisis.

Euromoney paid a visit to the annual British Bankers’ Association conference last month in London.

An investment bank wouldn’t be doing its job if it didn’t advise its clients on where they could potentially make money, and earn a fee from doing so.

A country’s credit rating can have unusual ramifications, as an anecdote from the hugely quotable former Colombian finance minister Juan Carlos Echeverry makes clear. His finance team was on a roadshow for an international bond issue when the news came through that Colombia had received its first investment-grade rating.

If there is one thing the financial markets love, it is an acronym. The boom years before 2007 spawned a dizzying tsunami of them – largely in the structured credit market where the shortcomings of the CDO squared or the CPDO became all too apparent.

Amid all the gloom around the difficulty for small businesses of raising bank funding, Euromoney is delighted to receive notification that Tortilla – a chain of fast-casual restaurants selling Californian-Mexican food in various City locations, including Canary Wharf, Leadenhall Market and Bankside – has just negotiated a £2.25 million loan from Santander Corporate bank to fund its continued expansion.