A friend of mine underlined this point the other day when he was regaling me with tales from the frontline over a whisky or two at The American Club.
His bank, a bulge bracket firm, lost out on a big deal from a lucrative issuer. Predictably the rumour mill went into overdrive. Part of the reason for the intrigue was that his shop was widely considered to be the house bank for the client in question – but out of nowhere another rival bank had stolen its thunder.
At this point I thought my friend was going to start railing about how the other bank bid too aggressively, used its balance sheet, damaged the market, etc etc. But instead my friend seemed pretty sanguine about the loss.
Just when I was about to congratulate him on his levelheaded approach to what had happened, he leaned towards me conspiratorially and said that the only reason his rival was able to snatch the deal away from him was because that bank was leasing expensive office space from the issuer. At least his bank did not have to resort to that kind of tactic, he said, for good measure.
Whether any of this is true I’ll never know, but I will say this: if I received a penny for every time a banker cooks up a wild conspiracy theory about how he lost out on a deal, I’d be an even wealthier man.