These are the times in which is bad if move and bad if you don't, for in one hand you may wind up having your client leave you with the taste of fraud if their effort is not concluded with a financial close, this mostly because the markets are upside down, structured products are being rejected as the plague; but on the other hand if you do not, you might miss whatever opportunity there may be in the market.... and believe me, they are out there, it is just a matter of staying calm (as if that was an easy feat...!!!).
For the time being, I will do what I was doing before I became an Investment Banker, that is supporting the family business of petroleum project development and consulting. Accepting the latter did not came as an easy one, but, alas, you have to behave like a responsible head of a family.
But getting back to original question, I have always believed that any sort of banking activity, is a most sacred course of business, since money is the sum of all energies avalable in this planet, as sacred in its commandments as in any organized belief, and probaly more so, because a failure in an individual's belief only harms at the most is this single individual (hopefully), but in the case of a bank or any financial intitution for that matter, a failure harms and even "kills" a person (in the sense that a lot of folks put their life efforts in the "capable hands" of these "Bankers") and many, many people, furthermore, sometimes as in the case of Bernard Madoff and Rober Allen Stanford, it hurts people by the thousands.
Over the years the various invitations that I got of sourcing investors in my region for "Investments Sanctioned by the Fed", or "run by former U.S. Secretary Brady" , plus many others that come around.
I remember when I was in college that a "most serious" banker named "Jose Zollino" had a company in the U.S. (inverworld) with offices in Mexico ran a Ponzi scheme the allegedly returned huge rates as dividens from its investmet programs, I saw relatives of my mates, most particularly, their mothers, some of them being widows, put all that they inherited in the hands of this "Banker", and wound up with nothing. At that point in time, I decided not to undertake these kind of venues at all, and so far, there has not ben any reason to regret it.
Under the current instance, it seems that the most possible course of action, is to redefine the entire banking project in order to include structure and procedures to insure the most transparent way of doing business, and to comunicate these development to the greater mass of institutional and corporate investors.
Probably, another course of action, would be to separate in a more profound way, what business line would be accomodated in which company, so that, the risks are allocated properly.
Any way, these and any other thought that comes in, will be shared through this nose wipe handkerchief....till the next one...have a goof one...
