Cityboy's articles
Submitted by Cityboy on Wed, 09/16/2009 - 11:25.
 “And now the end is near; and so I face the final curtain.” This is my penultimate column. Thelondonpaper is shutting down next Friday mainly because its advertising revenue has dried up as a direct result of this recession. It seems ironic that after three years spent warning Londoners every week in this paper that City boys are greedy shysters whose short-term, selfish actions will hurt us all that I am now myself a victim of a financial crisis brought about their hideous machinations.
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Submitted by Cityboy on Fri, 09/04/2009 - 14:09.
 Last week Lord Turner, the chairman of the City regulatory body the FSA, said that many of the City’s activities (e.g. trading, derivatives and hedging) were ‘socially useless’. He also said he would consider taxing banks’ financial transactions in order to reduce the banks’ size and their ability to hand out excessive bonuses. The City was absolutely horrified though traffic wardens and estate agents alike breathed a huge sigh of relief as attention was temporarily drawn away from their social ‘usefulness’.
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Submitted by Cityboy on Fri, 08/28/2009 - 11:02.
Almost exactly two years ago we experienced 'the day the world changed' as Adam Applegarth, former chief executive of the doomed Northern Rock, described it. On that day the French bank BNP Paribas halted withdrawals from three of its investment funds that were exposed to US sub-prime mortgages. Credit markets began to freeze soon after and we subsequently entered the first global recession since World War Two. If Winston Churchill is right that “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it” then we must surely try to understand the lessons from this financial crisis. There are many but here are a few I find quite interesting:
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Submitted by Cityboy on Thu, 08/20/2009 - 18:26.
'No-one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there's too much fraternizing with the enemy!' Whoever said that definitely wasn't referring to the world of investment banking. First of all, today's rules mean that even a lecherous wink at a female colleague can be lethal for your career prospects. Secondly, there are so few front-office female bankers that there ain't much fraternization to be done. What's interesting about this second point is that a recent Cambridge report claims that women dominate most other 'status professions' yet the City is still populated by men. How so?
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