the pride of Deutsche Bank

Deutsche Bank boss Josef Ackermann spent last night in Washington chilling with Bono, Bill Clinton and other dignitaries at the Atlantic Council’s annual awards dinner.

While he applauded the influential think tank’s “courage to give an award to a banker,” he acknowledged in his speech that bankers had made mistakes with financial instruments that were too complex to understand the risks that were taken. Continue reading »

brianpeganoff.JPGI don’t have to tell you that things on Wall Street have been prettay prettay prettay bad of late. You financial services hacks of the world are delicate flowers and right now, your ecosystem is being is being disrupted. You’re on edge and most of the time, at any given moment, you could easily see yourself going circus freak crazy on someone and maybe like killing a man in cold blood or something. Unfortunately this sort of behavior is still for the most part frowned upon at most firms on Wall Street (obviously you’ve got your exceptions- MWhitney Associates, DoubleLine, etc). You could go to some gym and do a little sparring in the ring but what you really want is a place where people will understand. Where they’ll get what you’re about. Enter: The Dungeon.

A black eye or row of stitches may grace John Cholish’s face when he meets with wealth-management clients at Merrill Lynch & Co. Those injuries occur after Cholish, 26, leaves his midtown Manhattan office and heads for the gym. Cholish and his roommate, Erik Owings, also a professional fighter, converted the top level of their duplex apartment on the Upper East Side into a gym, where Byrne sometimes brings Wall Street colleagues to work out.
“It’s the dungeon of pain,” said Brian Peganoff, an assistant vice president in corporate cash management at Deutsche Bank. Peganoff, 27, learned tae kwon do as a child and started boxing as a workout while attending Pennsylvania State University in University Park. He began jiu-jitsu about two years ago.

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