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“You don’t have
to predict it. We’re in it.”
- Paul Volcker, former US Federal Reserve chairman, responding to a
question on whether he still predicted a dollar crisis in coming years.
London, April
2010 – Wall Street firms have just announced their latest results for FY 2009;
300 million
staff have been “written down”, leaving just two (Sid and Doris Bonkers) to
manage the investment banks’ remaining worldwide debt, equity, merger and
advisory, securitisation, syndication and prime brokerage businesses.
Marti Peeps,
sole analyst at the last remaining research house, Teletext, welcomed the
results as “a bold step in the face of ongoing bad debt provisioning,” though
conceded that the City’s newly “rightsized” payroll might struggle to take on
board the burgeoning supply of new issuance, namely the packet of Walkers
Crisps rumoured to be hitting the primary market in late summer 2012.
Hopes for a
recovery in Wall Street earnings have for several quarters hinged on the
prospects for the successful completion of a 40p private placement of a bag of
Salt and Vinegar flavour crisps on behalf of the Walkers Crisps Company. Lead
underwriters JPCitigroupMerrill, a subsidiary of the US government, and
Northern Rock SocGen KFW Nomura, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tesco plc
(Neasden branch), are rumoured to have “solid” interest for the underwriting,
most notably from Asia, itself a subsidiary of Texas Pacific Group, but
declined to go into further detail.
According to a
filing at Companies House, recently rehoused atop a kebab shop on Tottenham
Court Road, The Walkers Crisps Company plans to use the proceeds from the
placement to refinance existing snackfood operations and to fund working
capital needs. The above investment banks are “focused on supporting institutional
private financings, strategic partnering and the acquisition needs of both
growing and mature businesses, and indeed corporate entities not necessarily
restricted to those operating in the Salt and Vinegar flavour potato-based
derivative snackfood market.”
The latest round
of layoffs on Wall Street has seen personnel departments resorting to ever-more
creative means for dispatching staff. A popular approach is the ‘cluster-fire’
escalating waterfall method, by which senior managers deliver ‘just-in-time’
firings to their own staff, and are then immediately fired themselves by their
own line reports, who are then in turn fired by the most senior manager on the
premises, at which point that manager is himself made redundant by means of a
controlled tactical nuclear burst. This latest word in financial disrecruitment
has been praised by Wall Street watchers as hyper-efficient, but there have
been complaints that pedestrians in nearby urban centres have been clubbed to
death by the falling body parts of newly superfluous brokerage employees.
In other popular
payroll deleveraging strategies, managers have been pouring gasoline over their
workforces and igniting them. This has proven increasingly difficult, however,
ever since people started stockpiling oil once it surpassed the psychologically
significant $1,000,000 a gallon level. Regulatory observers have also been
critical of such ritual staff immolation on ‘carbon footprint’ concerns. Mass
stoning, by contrast, has been deemed to be environmentally friendly.
Other financial
sector commentators suggested that the requirement for firings was less
pressing, now that dark, mounted riders in interesting robing were chasing
through the streets of New York and London and skewering passers-by with
sharpened, flaming spears. Others suggested that this was merely a legacy of
past investments in leveraged subprime deals.
Marti Peeps,
relaxedly smoking one of his last HBOS share certificates, posited that every
indicator saw signs of renewed growth, now that there were no more analysts
maintaining fatuous predictions of US corporate earnings growing by 15% this
year as per the previous four centuries. In late trading, the market for broken
pieces of jagged wood was $2.7 – 2.8 trillion per piece (1 Yuan in regular
currency). Defra, the UK Government department for the environment, food and
rural affairs, issued an upbeat assessment of prospects for the forthcoming
flint harvest. Analysts also expected a flurry of transactional activity in the
front month grass contract. Leaves were down $1,380,700,000 a bushel. Apples
and water did not trade, being bid only. Mr. Peeps apologised that his latest
research opinion on banks and brokers had been reported as ‘Sell’. This was a
typographical error. He had actually titled his outlook ‘Hell’.
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