Saturday, April 12, 2008

The Mood in the City

The mood in London financial markets is not good. House prices are going downtown, and with them the British pound (great for me and all the poor foreign tenants, but apparently bad for the majority). Investment bankers within UBS are looking around for jobs, and the Royal Bank of Scotland is sweeping ABN Amro's trading floor clean with incredible lack of style:

ABN’s structured credit traders were apparently told on Thursday that they should report to RBS’ London office in preparation for a move there on Monday. Terminals needed to be checked and such like. And when they got there… they were all fired (full story).

Luckily, the British have a great sense of humour, and I couldn't stop laughing at this economic assessment of London 2010 from the price of everything blog:

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London, April 2010 – Wall Street firms have just announced their latest results for FY 2009;

300 million staff have been “written down”, leaving just two (Sid and Doris Bonkers) to manage the investment banks’ remaining worldwide debt, equity, merger and advisory, securitisation, syndication and prime brokerage businesses.

Marti Peeps, sole analyst at the last remaining research house, Teletext, welcomed the results as “a bold step in the face of ongoing bad debt provisioning,” though conceded that the City’s newly “rightsized” payroll might struggle to take on board the burgeoning supply of new issuance, namely the packet of Walkers Crisps rumoured to be hitting the primary market in late summer 2012.Hopes for a recovery in Wall Street earnings have for several quarters hinged on the prospects for the successful completion of a 40p private placement of a bag of Salt and Vinegar flavour crisps on behalf of the Walkers Crisps Company. Lead underwriters JPCitigroupMerrill, a subsidiary of the US government, and Northern Rock SocGen KFW Nomura, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tesco plc (Neasden branch), are rumoured to have “solid” interest for the underwriting, most notably from Asia, itself a subsidiary of Texas Pacific Group, but declined to go into further detail.

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(click here for pdf version). Enjoy!

4 comments:

Iday said...

Angie, just thought i would extend my good wishes on the BoB nomination and a great year of blogging. Hope you are enjoying your Bschool days. Cheers.

Anonymous said...

Angie,
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your blogs, just as many before me. I really want to thank you for this treat! Not sure how long you will be keeping it alive, given that the year is towards the end and your start day is getting closer and closer.
In case you still go for a few rounds and have time for the n-th candidate's questions.. :-), I wanted to know a bit more detailed info about life at LBS with a partner. Also, just to spice it up a bit, from personal experience, what do you think of chances of a R4 admit? A couple of days to go until last deadline.. but I shall give it my shot.
East European, live/study/work in US/JP, 730, 6WE, exotic derivatives structuring, applying for MiF09 onebridge76 at gmail dot com
P.S. If you know any MiFs, would you put me in contact with one, would like to know some last impressions towards the end of the program, while they are still warm.

My regards from Tokyo
Bogdan

Anonymous said...

Hey Angie! congrats on the BoB nomination - I hope you win it once again :-) Your blog has been one of the biggest inspirations for me in taking my Join-LBS decision - Thanks

angie said...

Hi Bogdan - I replied to you but I wonder if my email landed in your spam folder? I use a yahoo account for this so I often end up in people's spam folders, in case you haven't heard from me, check your spam folder :-).