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More Muppet Show Adventures: Private Bankers being led down the garden path

With the Olympics almost upon us in London, it seems appropriate to have a Muppet team award. This goes out to the private bankers at Credit Suisse for their tri-athlon performance on behalf of their clients in matters structured products in the holy church of open architecture. (Editor’s note: I was at CS when these […]

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The Muppet Show: the correct use of the term in the banking world

Kiss & Tell at Goldman Sachs! With the joke about doing God’s Work getting a little old, one Greg Smith has done himself and the gossip columns a favour with that rather stinging and public resignation letter. Now first off, as best I can tell he was not badly treated at Goldman and did not […]

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Process control. The advanced class.

Editor’s Note: This is﹟7 in the series on Controls. All that heading stuff looks a bit funny in the emails, so I have dropped it. More. Yes, there’s more. Last week’s blog looked at the three basic elements of good process controls: One Screen, Score and Action. This week we will take it to the […]

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He with the best process wins. How to control the process

Editor’s Note: This is﹟6 in the series on Controls. All that heading stuff looks a bit funny in the emails, so I have dropped it. If you fancied talking about Process in a scientific way, you would say it is a function of Procedures and Systems. In the previous blogposts on this subject, I have […]

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Control V – The Procedure – How do we do that again?

The procedure. Inside a bank that is a topic that has all the appeal of a trip to the dentist. Regulators expect us to have them and senior managers expect us to follow them, not least because that certainly gets them a tick in the CYA box of life. For the poor schmucks that are […]

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Control II – How to miss an open window, lose $2mm and survive

I once lost $2mm of Goldman Sachs’ money and lived to tell the tale. This is a post about Corporate Actions. In banking this refers to events relating to the bonds or shares of a company. At the centre is Rupert Murdoch, or rather News Corp. For once not the villain in the story and […]

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Control I – A needle in a haystack

Mistakes. We all make mistakes. Some are innocent, some are fatal and some are “near misses”. And guess what, even the great Goldman Sachs has its share of mistakes too. One, to the tune of $1B, nearly blew up a major IPO deal. Some quick thinking managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, […]

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