HN user
He was an m&a lawyer with Wachtell and then a derivatives structurer at Goldman. But your point stands - a background in both the legal/deal making and trading sides of high finance gave him a terrific context. Then his insight, writing style and sheer unbelievable volume of throughput made him essential reading.
And what, would you say, is the current legally mandated "reserve requirement" in the US?
Chris Ford has something interesting to say about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg3XOfioapI
The group aggregated RWA calcs for a global tier 1 bank run substantially in arrears - perhaps as much as 2 months, and IIRC are submitted to the regulators quarterly.
The author is also using the word "spreadsheet" as shorthand to mean "the entire modelling infrastructure". For the trading book, this can be non-trivial.
A bit more context from Ed Yong:
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/06/02/why-have-...
+1
£2k a day is a loss-leader for Capita who are in it for the contacts.
It won't come with a final salary pension since that was reformed, but the contributions are still around the 20-25% mark, vs 6% in the real world.
I was expecting this: http://tartley.com/?p=1267
BAML interns in London are paid about twice the UK median wage pro rata.
Nope.
I've done what I'd call an "internal startup", which was successful, but with which I no longer have a great deal of involvement. I used a few hundred k of seed funding and a team of 4 to build a web app over about 4 months. It's in use at about 20 customers internationally, and is now delivered as a service model, sold internally through cross charging. i.e. we deal with internal partners and they do their own deal with the customer. I like to think it gave me a feel for some of the issues faced when doing a startup, but without many of the risks.
Interesting discussion here. A few things spring to mind:
- Consulting training still has an element of programming, but I suspect that will go when Core Analyst School moves to Bangalore later this year. The value is not that those guys will ever code, but to give them a feel for the types of problems that the engineers face.
- Solutions delivery (offshore or on) has pretty much taken development work off the plate of a consulting analyst.
- Consulting recruitment is swinging to favour engineering and technical disciplines more than it has historically.
- This group naturally favours high risk/high reward, deep technical competance, and engineering as a craft. This is antithetical to firms like Accenture that favour low risk (imply your own corrollary), relationships and business knowledge, and engineering as an industry. This is also favoured by our clients, which is why it's a very successful business.
- I've seen some projects in pretty dire straits, and I've seen over-committments. I've also seen some very effective cross-discipline teams dealing very well with difficult client situations. I've met a lot of very impressive people, and I've learnt a great deal from them.
- It's a truism that Accenture wouldn't be there unless there was a difficult business problem that the client felt that they couldn't solve on their own. Sometimes they couldn't have, but more frequently, in my experience, they could have done it themselves if it weren't for a paralysing fear of change.
- Internally, the firm changes org structure most years. This results in a very strong culture of personal network above business organisation. People are astonishingly willing to help someone they've never met, even when they are on the other side of the planet, and there's absolutely nothing in it for themself.
- I've never seen behaviour that I would regard as remotely unethical.
- The comment about NHS is right - Accenture UK took a massive financial hit, which resulted in a promotion freeze, and pay rises of less than inflation that year.
- My feeling at the moment is that Management Consulting will become much more distinct from Technology, which in turn will become more like a "normal" technology company.
Finally, it strikes me as a bit ironic that no one has yet highlighted the similarities between a "classic" Accenture project team and a startup. Both arrogantly believe that they can change things for the better by working very hard, learning a lot as they go and blending a variety of hard and soft skills. Sound familiar?