It is hard to imagine the international capital markets without Ian Kerr. For the best part of four decades, using many guises and voices, he applied his remarkable mind to uncovering every twist and turn in the markets, picking winners, savaging failures, and making the financial world laugh.
Ian, who died last week at the age of 66, is famous today as a gossip columnist, notably with EuroWeek, for which he wrote a long column almost every week from 1994 until just three weeks ago.
But his career as a fearlessly funny commentator on the Euromarkets had begun much earlier, when as a banker at Strauss Turnbull and Kidder Peabody in the 1960s and 1970s he began writing some of the first serious bond research.
Readers of Ian’s EuroWeek columns know the scorn he held for today’s equity and credit analysts and their reams of research, "mainly prized for their value as door-stops or reserve loo paper supplies for the outside dunny".
It is a curious irony that Ian was one of the very first pioneers of debt research — and that one of the original sources of this dry discipline was his terse and witty commentaries.
Ian was a unique figure and a dazzling, endearing, provoking character. His warm-hearted charm, wit and generosity were bywords, in a market where superficially charming people are everywhere. But it was his coupling of this personal vivacity with a piercing understanding of the financial world and an insatiable thirst to get at the hidden truth that made him exceptional.
Almost everyone one speaks to about Ian uses the same expressions: "unique", "one of a kind", "irreplaceable".
The talent of being a gossip writer is extremely rare, but Ian was one of the few who had the gift. The great gossip columnists — Britons might think of Nigel Dempster, Americans of Hedda Hopper — combine sycophancy with dauntless iconoclasm. They have to be able to mix as an equal with the rich, powerful, even the fiendishly clever; turn round and attack them ferociously the next day; and then face them again a week later without turning a hair. You need a hide as thick as an elephant’s for this work, and feet as nimble as a gazelle’s. Ian seemed to have been born for it.
But Ian’s value — and his standing in the world he inhabited — was in fact much higher than purveyors of celebrity tittle-tattle like Dempster.
He analysed, he dissected, he explored what investment banks were doing and how they were changing. He showered praise on the strategies that worked and ruthlessly excoriated those that did not.
His commentary genuinely influenced the thinking of chief executives and other top managers across a global industry — a degree of prominence that very few journalists in any field can hope to achieve.
For many in the capital markets, Ian was not only the pre-eminent financial journalist, but part of the structure of the market itself. And while Ian’s occasional boast that he could end someone’s career may have been exaggerated, bankers were well advised to get on the right side of him if they could.
Special appeal
The source of Ian’s power and influence lay in his character — chiefly, an extraordinary ability to win people over and entertain them.
Ian could make anyone feel special if he chose to, and usually this was quite unforced — he delighted in the company of a huge range of people, relished the nuances of every personality, and prized friendship, loyalty, generous hospitality and amusing conversation above all else.
These were also his own great virtues — all his friends recall his generosity as exceptional, even excessive. Long lunches at the homes he shared with his wife Vanessa in Surrey and then Berkshire were legendary, both among his friends in the Euromarkets and with colleagues at EuroWeek. Filled with stimulating talk and lubricated with copious good Riojas and other wines, lunch would often last until the evening and end up with everyone in the swimming pool.
Friends of Ian’s beloved daughter Georgina recall how he would take 10 or 15 of her schoolfriends to Marbella or Sotogrande in Spain every summer for weeks of wine and sunshine. Ian loved being surrounded by young people, and would write in his column of how Georgina’s leggy friends had cut a dash in polka dot bikinis.
Ian’s charm was partly founded on a remarkable memory: he appeared to remember every funny story he had ever been told, as well as details of everyone’s life and family and a mental archive of Euromarkets history that if written down would have filled shelves of books.
It was this memory and his easy, amusing style, both in person and on paper, that enabled him by the time he was running Eurobond research at Kidder Peabody in the 1970s to amass an unrivalled network of Euromarket contacts. "He was perpetually on the road," recalls George Westropp, a close friend since 1962, who shared flats with Ian and was his best man. "He was always meeting investors and competitors — if you wanted your bond to get going, you wanted him to give it the once-over. So he had the most enormous book of contacts in the investment banking world."
The range and quality of Ian’s sources continued to grow and fuelled his writing from his days in research right through the columns he later wrote for Euromoney, International Financing Review, EuroWeek and Financial News.
Talking to the top
His contacts included many of the best known names in the City and on Wall Street, right up to many chief executives of bulge bracket investment banks and brokerages. He knew hedge fund managers, asset managers of all kinds, and countless active investment bankers, especially in fixed income origination, syndicate, sales and trading.
These sources supplied Ian for years with a torrent of gossip, so that his columns at Euromoney, IFR and EuroWeek brimmed with tales of turf wars, indiscretions and internecine battles for power.
It was only in the last few years that this flow of spicy tales diminished, but that gave Ian more time and space to focus on a few key stories that he pushed very hard.
Usually these were campaigns against the top management at particular firms, which he regarded as weak. He called relentlessly for the heads of CEOs: Philip Purcell at Morgan Stanley; Rolf Breuer at Deutsche Bank and then Deutsche Börse; Chuck Prince at Citigroup.
But there were many other articles making specific criticisms of every single firm in the market, as well as highlighting their achievements. One bank, he would argue, was a poor judge of people and had promoted the wrong individuals, while leaving itself short of inspired rainmakers; another was half asleep and missed good opportunities in new markets, while allowing itself to be trounced on its home turf; at a third, he might diagnose a case of over-mighty departmental chieftains, protecting their own followers and caring little for the health of the firm.
In the past few months, he was one of the first journalists to see the importance of the collapse of Dillon Read Capital Management, UBS’s in-house hedge fund; to suspect that UBS’s losses would grow; and to explain the internal politics that led to the fund’s creation and allowed it to get out of hand.
Often banks singled out for these attacks would tell EuroWeek in aggrieved terms how unfair it was, and how Ian always seemed to have it in for them, and would never have written these things about another bank. That was quite untrue: he spared no one, and almost invariably he was attacking the bank because its own senior employees were telling him these were the things wrong with it.
Almost always, his views were vindicated when they later became widely accepted, or when institutions changed in the direction that he had forecast or recommended.
Rarely, he would turn out to have made the wrong call, as when he disparaged the merger of Salomon Smith Barney and Citigroup as ‘Bonkersbank’, believing that the firms’ cultures were incompatible. Ian freely admitted his mistake when Citigroup went through a period of impressive success in the early 2000s.
That anyone could ever match Ian’s unparalleled access to high-placed people or his penetrating insight — still less that this could be done in an effortlessly funny style that everyone found easy and enjoyable to read — is almost certainly impossible.
Ian Murray Kerr was born on April 30, 1942 in Abadan, Iran. His Scottish father, Ronald Newman Kerr, was working in the oilfields there for British Petroleum, and his wife Elna had lately joined him with Ian’s sister Valerie, two years older. The threat of a German attack made the Kerr parents send their children to South Africa for the duration of the war.
Valerie (now Walsh) does not know who looked after her and her brother in South Africa. But after the war, aged five and three, they came to Britain and lived in Reigate, Surrey with their father’s twin sister, Winifred, and older sister, Muriel.
"We lived with our aunts for the next five years, before we went off to our ‘big schools’," Valerie recalls. "They were very Victorian, very strict — you had to eat everything on your plate. But Ian and I had so much fun. We went to the local school together, we skipped Sunday school together."
At the ages of 10 and eight, Valerie and Ian took the train together to boarding school: Valerie to York and Ian to Edinburgh, where he attended the Clifton Hall prep school and then Fettes College, one of the leading Scottish public schools.
Ian thought of himself as Scottish — though that did not stop him lampooning the Scots in his columns as tight-fisted, oatmeal-eating, kilt-wearing Presbyterians.
But interestingly, he pronounced his surname ‘Carr’ — the upper class English pronunciation — though his younger sister Heather Bellamy says it the Scottish way: ‘Care’. Only the ignorant would call him ‘Ian Curr’.
At school Ian imbibed much of the learning that would later infuse his columns, and his enjoyment of writing was apparent at this stage.
In Ian’s teens the children visited their parents in Nigeria, where Ronald Kerr had been posted. Valerie remembers travelling south by train with Ian at the beginning of the school holidays. "Once I met him on the train — he had been beaten at Fettes the day before, for going to the pub or something," she says. "He couldn’t sit down, so he stood up for the whole eight hour journey."
Ian’s sister Heather, known as Bunny, is 11 years younger than him. She remembers how, when she was herself at boarding school and he was working in the City, he would take her out from school. "He was always amazingly generous. He used to take me and all my friends out — once he nearly got me expelled because he took us to the pub and we were late back. He absolutely loved life and lived it to the full."
Leaving Fettes in the early 1960s, Ian headed straight for the City. "None of us went to university in those days, unless we wanted to be doctors or engineers," says Westropp.
Into his element
Ian began as a "lowly backroom boy", in Westropp’s words, at Norris Oakley, the stockbroking firm, and became a fairly successful stockbroker.
But it was his move in 1964 to the nearby firm of Strauss, Turnbull & Co that kickstarted his career. Julius Strauss, one of the partners, spotted Ian’s talent and he became Strauss’s bag carrier.
Julius Strauss was one of the early pioneers of the Eurobond market, who had been working in the field since before the war. But in 1963 the market really took off, with a $15m issue for Autostrade, and many of the leading City banks began to exploit its potential.
The market at this stage was charged with excitement, but chaotic — issues were still settled in New York, though all the investors, underwriters and knowledge about the market were outside the US.
There was a clear need for accurate information and analysis, and Ian began writing briefings for investors, including pieces on new issues led by Strauss Turnbull.
"He was a leading light — when it came to Eurobonds there was no one better. He was probably the most knowledgeable man on either side of the Atlantic at that time," says Westropp, who was then a financial journalist and later moved into the City.
But although Ian’s capacity for hard work was evident — he would be in the office early and travel a lot — his sense of style and fun were clear. "As a young chap in the City he was a trendsetter," says Westropp. "He was the first man, other than rockers and the like, who wore Chelsea boots, long-waisted suits and very long, velvet-collared overcoats with a waist. After a while almost anyone with any pretensions to fashion in the City was wearing them."
Westropp also remembers going to a set of deb dances with Ian, for which they borrowed a Humber car. "Ian couldn’t see terribly well, which was why he wrote in long hand," he says. "At Penrith he mistook a wall for a road, crashed through it and killed a couple of sheep. It wasn’t the last time he drove, but it probably should have been."
It was around 1970 that Ian married for the first time, to Annabel Coldstream. The marriage ended in divorce a few years later.
Gossip at the kitchen table
In 1973 Ian had left Strauss Turnbull and was out of work, when he was snapped up by the 100 year old US firm of Kidder Peabody.
The man who hired him, and who became his mentor, was Stanley Ross, chairman of Kidder’s London operations, who had pushed Kidder to build up its Eurobond business.
Ross took Ian on to assist him with a weekly letter he sent out to investors called The Week in Eurobonds.
"I had started at Kidder in 1967, when Kidder had no idea what a Eurobond was," says Ross. "We built up an enormous business but since the people at head office didn’t know anything about it, they told me to send them a telex every week telling them what was going on. I did that for a year or more and then they started sending it out to clients."
For years Ross jotted the letter down on his way home in the car on Thursday evenings and worked until midnight typing it up on the kitchen table, with his wife’s help. It was posted out every Friday.
But Ross’s letter was one of the progenitors, both of Eurobond research and of Eurobond journalism.
By 1973 Ross needed someone to help. Put in charge of Kidder’s nascent Eurobond advisory department, Ian proved ideal, adding a wealth of detail on new issues and trading ideas to Ross’s gossipy mixture of news, analysis and rants about high income tax (then 83% above £8,500).
"Ian couldn’t read a balance sheet," recalls Alex Bridport, chairman of Bridport & Cie and a friend since the 1970s. "But he wrote about his gut feelings, which were invariably right. He was the first person to write amusingly about the market."
Certainly, Ian’s bulletins were very widely read at a time when there was little information, let alone insight, available to investors and market-makers in the fledgling Eurobond market, where Kidder was one of the leading trading firms.
"He had the ability to pick out situations," says Ross. "He would look at issues that were just about to come to market and say ‘We’ve got issues that are infinitely cheaper — these are coming on the wrong basis.’ We didn’t make any friends among the new issue houses."
Ian quickly became a star. "Kidder Peabody put him on the road for weeks at a time," says Westropp. "He was their chief analyst, talking to investors in Hong Kong, New York. He would go to Geneva or Zurich and he couldn’t get away because so many people wanted to talk to him."
Ross remembers: "He had such an easy, fluent, engaging manner and really made people feel that he knew what he was talking about. I loved going on the road with him."
Even so, Ross had to protect Ian when Kidder wanted to sack him for being too outspoken and flamboyant in his personal life. In the end, Ross was sacked first and Ian remained at Kidder Peabody until the mid-1980s, rising to executive director and becoming a shareholder in the firm.
By then, Ian was a well known authority on the Eurobond market. He lectured every year at the Association of International Bond Dealers’ teaching seminars in Montreux and was a regular speaker at conferences.
In 1984 he wrote a full length book, A History of the Eurobond Market: the First 21 Years, published by Euromoney Publications. It remains an essential source for anyone interested in how the international capital markets came into being.
Happiness strikes
It was at the beginning of the 1980s that Ian met the love of his life, Vanessa Dowling. The story goes — though his sister Valerie is not quite sure it’s authentic — that they met when Vanessa was putting out the rubbish after a New Year’s Eve party.
She lived with her family on the top floor of a building in Kensington where Ian had a ground floor flat. Vanessa’s family at first disapproved of Ian and opposed the match, telling her: "It won’t last three months." Vanessa retorted: "I’ll make it last three months and a day if it kills me."
In fact, they had a blissfully happy marriage and were inseparable — one friend says they were only apart for two nights in 22 years. In 1982, their only child, Georgina, was born. As all his friends attest, she was the apple of Ian’s eye; and she equally devoted to him.
Vanessa shared Ian’s love of, and gift for, hospitality and conversation, and his joyous enthusiasm for life.
"Ian and Vanessa were so finely poised, Vanessa a strategist to Ian’s extraordinary tactics and style," says Tim Skeet, a debt capital markets banker who was a frequent guest at their home. "They formed a partnership that worked at all levels. Certainly, Vanessa always had a firm view of Ian’s creative talent and how to channel it."
A new calling
Back in the world of work, Ian was eventually sacked by Kidder Peabody in the mid-1980s, but by then the firm was on its last legs. Rescued by General Electric in 1986, it became embroiled in insider trading scandals, and was finally put out of its misery when PaineWebber bought it in 1994. Ian always referred to Kidder in his columns as "Kidder Peabody (Very RIP)".
But long before leaving investment banking, Ian had begun his second career — as a journalist.
"Ian did his greatest bodies of work after he left Kidder," says Ross. "He saw from the political pressures in the organisation that you couldn’t be within a corporate entity — you had to be in a news reporting role. He learned at Kidder that he could do that, and sail closer to the wind."
While he was still at Kidder, Padraic Fallon, then editor of Euromoney and now chairman of Euromoney Institutional Investor, recruited Ian to write a humorous column.
In July 1981 his first professional piece as a journalist appeared in Euromoney under the title ‘Diary of a Eurobond Salesman’.
Usually a page long, this anonymous column appeared every month for five years, though it mutated quickly into ‘Diary of a Eurobond Investor’ and later ‘Diary of an Investment Banker’.
Here, Ian could let his satirical genius rip. The columns are ram-packed with scurrilous gossip about all the leading Euromarket figures of the day, often outrageous jokes at their expense, glimpses of the rakish high life of capital markets bankers — all mingled with sharp asides highlighting the weaknesses of particular bond issues.
The columns were framed as diaries, and read with an amazing freshness and verisimilitude: probably because they were potted and grotesqued versions of Ian’s own picaresque adventures during the past month.
After his exit from Kidder, Ian took up residence at IFR, where for 10 years he wrote a weekly gossip column called Eminence Noire, as well as straight pieces called The Inquisitor, analysing different aspects of the market.
When he eventually fell out with IFR — different accounts of exactly why abound — Euromoney pounced. This time, Ian’s column appeared under his own name, every week since 1994, in EuroWeek — and at much greater length, typically three dense pages.
Painting the markets’ image
At EuroWeek Ian found a stable base and ready outlet for his talents. He employed and refined his mature style, developed at IFR. Referring to himself as "we", he stretched his scope to encompass the complete strategy of global investment banks, the rivalry between them and their internal politics at the highest levels.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Ian’s influence in the boardrooms of the world’s investment banks reached its zenith.
One banker recalls walking into the office of an issuer client in New Zealand and seeing Ian’s column on the desk in front of the treasurer. The borrower proceeded to take him to task on criticisms Ian had made of the banker and his firm.
One of the most impressive things about Ian during these years was how he kept up with the times. Despite his inability to use a computer, caused partly by poor eyesight, he loved modernity, and was always quick to attack firms that allowed themselves to be left behind by progress. He peppered his columns with slang picked up from Georgina and her friends, describing women as "scrunchy", for example, or saying how some bigwig had had a "bad hair day".
Ian was modest to a fault about his own brains, but even though he did not pretend to understand every quant-driven trading strategy, his instinct for the markets and deep understanding of how banks and institutions worked enabled him to analyse perceptively the way all the latest financing techniques and markets fitted in to the contemporary investment banking business.
"People accused him of having a hard core of mates that he always turned to," says Nick Evans, Ian’s first editor at EuroWeek. "But I don’t think anybody had a better sense of who the up-and-coming people were in banks, and who were the real moneymakers. Often hardly anyone had heard of them when Ian first mentioned them, but they would go on to emerge as top people. He really did understand investment banks and what makes them tick — often better than the people running them."
Tragedy and courage
Ian came through a double heart attack in 1998 and subsequent quadruple bypass surgery with incredible strength. He missed only a few weeks’ columns.
But in 2002 Ian and Georgina were dealt a cruel blow when Vanessa was taken ill without any warning and died within 24 hours of a brain haemorrhage. She was just 44.
Ian was devastated — and although he devoted his emotional energy even more wholeheartedly to Georgina, all who know him say that he never recovered. Though with most of his contacts and acquaintances, he kept up the old bravado, inquisitiveness and enthusiasm, inside he was lost.
In 2005 his own health took a turn for the worse when a hip replacement went badly wrong and had to be redone twice, leading to a life-threatening infection. His friends rescued him from the ministrations of Harley Street and helped him into a clinic in Switzerland.
"I think he had seven operations," says Bridport. "I said goodbye to him three times." But Ian pulled through, and as soon as he could, was back to penning columns from the convalescent home at Bad Ragaz — when he was not flirting with the nurses.
Epitome of the markets
Like all truly great and talented people, Ian had his faults. In person and in print, he could be rude, vindictive, snobbish and prejudiced.
One City PR official tells the story of how she tried for months — it should be said, during the years of Ian’s ill health — to set up a meeting between Ian and the new head of a firm which he had criticised liberally.
She finally got her CEO to find space in his diary and booked a private room at a top City restaurant. When she rang Ian to invite him, he replied haughtily: "You’ll have to change it to the West End. I only come in to the City to meet Anshu Jain."
But associates knew that this was not Ian’s true nature. Mark Johnson, his editor at EuroWeek from 1996 to 2000, says that one of the things Ian enjoyed most was to finally meet someone he had been rude about and find that he actually rather liked them. He could get on with and admire people he had previously scorned, as well as those with very different backgrounds and views from his own.
It was well known among senior Euromarket players that Ian occasionally acted as a sort of headhunter, playing a facilitating role in placing senior bankers in key positions.
For example, he is believed to have made the initial introduction between Lenny Fischer and Andrew Pisker, whom Fischer hired as head of bonds at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein in 2000. Pisker went on to be chief executive.
But some friends say that Ian was not paid for many of his introductions, even though he certainly was for others. In general, this aspect of his consultancy work was probably much less prolific and successful than was widely believed.
Ian even privately admitted that once or twice in the early stages of his career as a journalist, he took money from market institutions to go easy on them in his columns.
But though there were sometimes signs in his writing of favourable coverage of institutions or people that he was close to, he could — and did — always justify his praise with detailed arguments as to why that firm was successful and deserved his backing. And virtually always he was right.
Certainly, even his closest allies could never tell him what to write and were frequently exasperated by it — and he was never afraid to criticise them when they underperformed.
"Rather than try to edit out Ian’s bugbears and enthusiasms, EuroWeek always took the view that Ian wore his heart on his sleeve — yes, he might blow the trumpet of an institution or individual, but his reasons were always set out in black and white and his readers were quite free to disagree," says Toby Fildes, his third EuroWeek editor.
Ian remained to the end incredibly well connected and well informed, alert as a bloodhound to what was going on within the banks, thirsty for a story, and deadly accurate in his diagnoses. In 14 years at EuroWeek, we never had to retract anything of substance that Ian had written.
That he remained relevant, dangerous, amusing and impossible to ignore, right up to the last weeks of a 40 year career in one of the fastest-changing fields of human activity, is testament to Ian’s unique talent, exceptional stamina, and passionate affair with the markets he loved.
"He went out as someone who loved writing, and whom people loved reading," says Johnson. "His engagement, love of meeting new people, love of the chase, love of excitement and humour kept him going when all around him was changing."
Those who knew Ian will remember the way he answered the phone, which seemed to encapsulate so much of his character. It was always the same: his voice would come on the line upbeat, full of eager curiosity, as if each phone call held the potential for a new scoop or snippet of intrigue. Framing the words almost as a question, he would say: "Ian Kerr?"
