Quotes of the month
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Viswas Raghavan, chief executive of EMEA and co-head of global investment banking at JPMorgan sees a future in the office. -
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During the coronavirus crisis, Euromoney’s mission is to get the key figures in finance to tell us what it means for their firms and for the industry. We’ll run some of the key things they tell us each month.
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What is said on tour, stays on tour. Unless it is part of an awards pitch. Here are some of the mixed metaphors, subtle and not-so-subtle jibes and some incomprehensible nonsense we heard during the pitches for this year’s Awards for Excellence.
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Ralph Schlosstein, chief executive of Evercore, is moving his firm up the league tables with an old-fashioned approach
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Steve Ashley, head of wholesale and global markets at Nomura, is bullish after the international arm of the Japanese securities house delivered a profit
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Ant Financial’s Jia Hang confirms suspicions that the scope of Jack Ma’s ambitions in finance are very great indeed
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Christian Meissner, head of GCIB at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has changed his own outlook to the long term, while forcing his division to do the same
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Stephen Bird is 18 months into his role as global head of consumer banking at Citi, and a recently-launched app is only part of his strategy
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John Cryan, co-CEO of Deutsche Bank, knows his options are limited as he tries to halt the bank’s decline [March]
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Adi Ben-Ari, co-founder of Applied Blockchain, says that a hard fork could be coming in the relationship between fintech and the capital markets
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The Bundesbank’s Andreas Dombret doesn’t shy away from the depth of problems facing Germany’s banking industry
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Stefano Visalli, founder and managing partner of Oxy Capital, gets right to the heart of Italian banks’ bad-debt problem
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Doubts that are helping to keen the share price of Barclays at well below book value – just one of the challenges that new CEO Jes Staley faces
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Martin Blessing may have stepped down as CEO of Commerzbank, but it does not sound like he is done with banking
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Banque de France’s Robert Ophèle does a regulator’s take on Bob Diamond’s old line about an end to banker bashing
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-John Cryan, co-CEO of Deutsche Bank, knows his options are limited as he tries to halt the bank’s decline
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“We now refer to Puerto Rico and its restructuring plans as the Kardashians. Everyone wants to talk about it but there really is no point”
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“If I stop my so-called bulimic development, in five years I would have no debts…then what? That would be stupid because I would not have grown for five years”
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“Fixed income is the area in the firing line because it used to make so much of the money but now accounts for so much of the leverage”
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"My role has flipped in a matter of months from trying to interest people here in thinking differently about the potential of the blockchain to struggling to contain their expectations. It isn’t the answer to all banks’ problems”
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“As soon as you have climbed one regulatory hill then the next one is already looming”
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“In the US, there are still way too many banks and consolidation must happen. If you believe that, you should be a leader, not a follower”
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“I remember the morning I discovered my car had been burnt out outside the house. I’ve had some close security, but I never wanted them to be overly obvious and get in the way. I mean: they hadn’t attacked the house or anything. They had just burnt the car. It was a message: ‘People are angry’. I understood that”
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“I’m reminded of what Bill Gates once said about building tech companies: that the market typically overestimates what should be achieved in the first three years and underestimates what can be achieved in 10”
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“Issuers can tap the US private placement market but we want to get to the next leg down. In the long term European corporates want their own source of demand”
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“When these large global banks report their risk-weighted capital ratios, their creditworthiness is flattered because of their assessment of risks in the asset base. This is a fools-errand; it’s like asking a school-kid what grade they deserve”
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“This isn’t the end. It is the beginning. There are many more stress tests yet to come”
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“Phones 4U serves as a timely reminder that even in low default environments, fundamentals do matter”
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“They were valuing (the assets) using discounted cash flow, which gives a different value about, let’s say, 10 times the actual value of the market price. He wanted me to write a paper saying that not only was this possible but that it was appropriate”
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“What’s so bad about being good at financing? Are our critics saying that M&A advisory is a skill but that financing is not? Trust me, you can be bad at financing. You can read the markets wrong, be too quick to commit or not commit fast enough. Having the best read on where your clients can raise the money to get a strategic transaction done, how quickly, in what amounts and with what degree of certainty is vital”
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“The primary market has become our liquidity window, offering almost the only chance to put money to work in size. In the US high-grade market we started to see new issues coming through secondary trading levels last year. The primary market is no longer about gaining premium, it’s more about achieving your fill and getting a large quantity of money invested” Juan Landazabal of Deutsche Asset and Wealth Management explains how lack of liquidity in bond markets is driving the order frenzy in new issues
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"If this evolves into a refined global framework that clarifies home-host responsibilities and supports cross-border trust, that is an important development. That would help support the global effort to end too-big-to fail. If this encourages the global community to develop thoughtful, consistent architecture in this area, this could end up being a positive outcome overall"
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"In the 2008 to 2012 cycle, emerging markets were providing the growth dynamic. Now, because you have slightly better growth in the west, it doesn’t mean that all emerging markets are basket cases."
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"Barely any clients know what their investment performance is, even those who say they are more investment-oriented. The number-one reason clients leave their bankers is not performance, but rather because their phone calls were not returned quickly enough"
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"When you have so much money, you can buy everything. But you cannot buy the French justice system. You will have to submit to its rules. The budget of the French justice system is less than the sum diverted by Mr Ablyazov from the Russian Federation alone."
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“All ABS were perceived as too risky due to the US experience in the subprime mortgage markets. But this regulation is like calibrating the price of flood insurance on the experience of New Orleans for a city like Madrid” Yves Mersch, board member of the ECB, exposes the absurdity of capital treatment of asset-backed securities in Europe (see Chain reaction: Can the need for SME finance set Europe’s securitization market free?)
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"The day one of the big oil companies first invoices China for oil in renminbis and receives payment in Chinese government bonds as result is what will really open people’s eyes"
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"It is borrowers’ own issuance patterns that have led to this state of illiquidity. And what are they doing about it? Nothing. We need dealers and corporate treasurers to engage more constructively on this"
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"When I got here, the bank was a time bomb. We had £700 billion of banking assets and £300 billion of wholesale funding, half of which was short-term with an average tenor of two months. The bank was in danger of going bankrupt"
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"Corporates that issue hybrids get part equity treatment which enables their senior bonds to get a higher rating or for their rating to be protected. But another way of looking at it is that the corporate now has more debt so the probability of default is higher. This is a ratings and rules arbitrage. If you are going to play in this market you had better understand the motivations behind that arbitrage"
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“They needed a good kick up the backside” Tony Fernandes, CEO of Air Asia, on the post-crisis banking industry
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"We are trying to actualize a market that has been very much talked about but primarily theoretical"
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"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"
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"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"
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"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"
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"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"
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We could build capital to the moon and we would not have to worry about an institution failing, but the economy would not be there”
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"They would overly emphasize the 120% debt-to-GDP ratio as a means to squeeze the private sector to accept a lower interest rate on their future claims. They also kept hidden throughout the negotiations the amount of money they were going to put into the Greek rescue package"
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"I told my banker that while it looked like the bank was lending me £5 million and it was certainly charging me for £5 million, it was really only lending me £2.5 million. I wonder how many times that has happened"
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"I have never in my life seen Spain in such a difficult moment as this. We’re trying to do as much as we can for the country. The situation in the country worries me, but the situation of the bank does not. Santander is in a great position. Our subsidiaries model has been totally vindicated. The group is strong, even when one part of the group is weakened"
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"Investing for impact is the most important evolution in investing we have seen in our lifetime"
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"The entire lending industry was so inefficient, and the way to make it efficient was to cut out the bank"
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"There’s an intuitive grocer-shop mentality towards bookrunners – ‘three or four for the price of one’ – but when it comes to actually managing the deal you can only have two or three. Otherwise there’s chaos and no responsibility"
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"I had a discussion with a very senior regulator recently who told me: ‘Look, I know we’ve gone too far too fast on some of this and that we’ve made some errors, but I’m afraid I don’t know how to stop this process.’ Now that’s quite scary"
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"To be an Apple in the wealth-management arena with regards to technology would be the holy grail"
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"We think this is a once in 35 year opportunity for the banking system. We are in a perfect storm as customer loyalty to their bank is low and customer service has been a key differentiator"
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"He needs to get his returns back on track soon or else investors will start to pull out money, which will bring down assets, and then more will pull out. He’s far from over but he has lost a lot of money now, which is concerning"
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"Starting as managing director with Christine Lagarde’s background is not an advantage at this point...There are arguments to say there should be some distance between the region concerned and the people who have to decide how the fund deals with it"
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"It is highly optimistic, if not naïve, to believe that forcing debt investors to contribute to a bank’s recapitalization would encourage them to lend fresh money to this bank"
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"What does he mean by this? I suppose it is about police coming and taking us like we see with the press. What kind of police-type measures could be imposed against a bank? This is like a joke. Isn’t this a state of law?"
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“The prime-minister designate asked me: ‘Are you refusing to serve your country?’ Something inside me said ‘Look, go, give it a try’”
