Euroblog

When former Rabobank analyst Olly Burrows’ wife and one of their four children came home early to find a burglar trashing their upstairs bedroom, it was not funny.

One of the FIG world’s most extracurricularly active bankers was devastated last week when he found he was going to have to miss his annual trip to Cheltenham for the races because of work.

Who’s up for a little Russian oil/commodity play?

European Central Bank president Mario Draghi was worryingly late to the January press conference at which he announced the central bank would be embarking on full scale quantitative easing, but pictures released on an Italian website give clues as to why.

Confusion hit Blog Towers late last week after a press release arrived in our inbox about Macquarie arranging financing for LDC to buy the NEC Group from Birmingham City Council.

“What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” wrote William Shakespeare.

Christmas : every year the season comes a little bit earlier. And though an agreeable effect of this fact is that we all get to hear the WHAM! Christmas classic “Last Christmas” endlessly churned through department store speakers until the choral phrase “Last Christmas, I gave you my heart” begins to take on gruesome surgical connotations, one of the side effects is that the holiday spirit gets….well — stretched a little thin.

No nugget of information gleaned from an emerging market banker has ever been ever more unexpected.

He might be “The Boss” to an army of fawning public sector origination bankers, but Frank Czichowski, treasurer of KfW, made no secret of his admiration for Bruce Springsteen.

In the course of our crusading financial journalising, Blog receives our fair share of odd messages from sources. One this week beat them all, however. We opened an email one morning which read simply: “Virgin, I am free.”

Blog has noted with a mixture of admiration and concern the rise in popularity of extreme adventure sports among the banking community.

As the days get shorter and the commute that little bit colder, we like to hold onto the summer spirit as long as possible — ‘keep warm and carry sunglasses’ is Blog’s personal philosophy. But it seems that the Street is taking it to the next level.