Last week Goldman and Morgan Stanley dropped sneaky hints about maybe changing their accounting so they could lend their way into more M&A deals. But this week we’re back to Barclays lending its way into more M&A deals, and Skip McGee got a little excited about it for DealBook:
“We’ve long had a big-boy M.& A. business,” Hugh E. McGee III, Barclays’ head of investment banking and a Lehman veteran, said in an interview. “And now we’ve got a big-boy checkbook.”
That’s a pleasingly straightforward take on the Barclays rises from Lehman’s ashes story, in which Lehman bankers find it quite congenial to be able to win deals by lending gobs of money to companies to pay for their mergers. Not that that’s how Barclays wins mandates or anything:
But Mr. McGee said the bank’s aim was not to rely on lending to get into deals. Barclays is less likely to make a giant loan commitment if it is not one of the lead advisers on a transaction, he said, and is being discerning about to whom it lends.
“We want to lead with our relationships and then use our balance sheet,” he said. “We don’t want to lead with our balance sheet.”
So is that working? Just for fun/to play with the Secret Dealbreaker Bloomberg/to make some charts, I made some charts. Continue reading »
Only if your flight is under four hours, if you leave the office past ten, and if you’re working and hungry before 9PM but still- this hurts.
To: IBD EMEA
From: Richard Blackburn and Chris Winchenbaugh
Cc: IBD ExCo, IBD COO’s, Talent Management
Date: 3 October 2011
Subject: 4th Quarter Savings Initiatives
We have done a great job this year driving our business forward and delivering on revenue and market share. Importantly, our division has been vigilant on costs and we have been able to manage our overall cost structure aggressively. However, as you are all aware, we continue to operate in a difficult environment, and we have more to do on cost savings.
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Back in November, former Lehman Brothers head of investment banking/current Barclays employee of the same title Hugh “Skip” McGee wrote a tear-stained letter to his son’s boarding school. The Skipper had held his tongue until then, but no longer could he sit by and watch as he flushed thousands of dollars down the toilet each year so the fruit of his loins could have his mind poisoned by the hippies (and what he’s pretty sure are lesbians) running that place. In his note, Baby Huey laid out three reasons for his anger:
1. The school made a bunch of high school boys very upset (not just upset, “humiliated”) when it wouldn’t let them dress in drag for a pep rally.
2. Something about “a gay female coach” (Skip’s original draft: “fucking dyke”) who favors girl sports.
3. (The pièce de résistance:) History teacher Leslie Lovett, who injects her ‘leftist invective’ in the curriculum and said mean, hurtful things about investment bankers, particularly those working for Lehman and Barclays, and made Skippy’s son cry. Luckily, Skip Jr. wiped his eyes, stood up to Ms. Lovett and said, you are wrong about my dad! He wanted to save Lehman. He wanted to save Lehman so bad!
For all those reasons (and more, which the Skip didn’t even want to get into), he called for the dismissal of Upper School Principal Michael Saltman (THIS IS THE PRICK WHO WOULDN’T LET THE DRAG SHOW GO ON), Headmaster Donald North and the teacher, Leslie Lovett. And this week? Success! Kind of! Saltman has “resigned,” and the next generation of McGees can wear dresses without worrying some lefty is going to ruin their good time. All members of the Barclays community are invited to meet in the lobby promptly at 3 to celebrate this momentous occasion. Shareholders, come along, too. You’re gonna wanna get a load of who’s working ya.
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