Ongoing adventures in banking racial stereotypes

Quickly people become institutionalised. I know of some very sad cases of people who tried to leave this one rating agency to go and work in investment banking only to end up returning to the institution because they could not make it elsewhere. True. Others have become serial job hoppers within investment banking industry. So much for French management and thinking as a skill. I think the French and rating agencies go hand in hand. Or as they say in France plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

At one ratings agency London office they have a Frenchman as an MD within Structured Finance. He sits in his corner office and never comes out. Whenever he does he only acknowledges a select few individuals on his way to the l'eau. Honest! If you do not receive a greeting your career, if you can call it that your career there is finished. Beneath him there are two other French MDs, to whom he delegates. That is when there is work to be done. I say this as the institution currently has a negative working capital position of US$ - 482.7 million for the March 2009 quarter. This is a slight improvement year on year when it fell to US$ -584 million in March 2008. I am not suggesting that the French are in anyway to blame for the laughable state of this balance sheet but it may go a long way to explain why they cannot pay their staff a decent and fair salary, and thus explaining the "bridge and tunnel" element within the NY office. The other thing to point out is that the organisation in question is an "institution". The Corporation has a very confined way of managing people with very vertical and limited scope in offering stimulating careers to people.

Traders and private bankers in the same category ? Shurely shome mishtake.

Agencies are shot through with Frenchies: reason is simply the volume of mathematically-adept graduates that their universities spit out every year, and a general preparedness, given oversupply of such graduates, to work for not-so-vast amounts of money. Fitch goes so far as to garland visitors with onions on arrival at their offices, pipe Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birken into meeting rooms and serve gamey and moreish horseflesh baps.

@ Douche - I know several French people who work in ratings agencies, and I was thinking (perhaps unfairly) of the rant by members of the Commons Treasury select committee where they muttered about French people in ratings agencies (see h**p://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/320b...