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Sajid Javid Deutsche Bank

Reading his background, he has taken a very unconventional path. Did banks recruit from Exeter Uni?

 

In 2007, he relocated to Singapore as head of Deutsche Bank's credit trading, equity convertibles, commodities and private equity businesses in Asia,[24] and was appointed a board member of Deutsche Bank International Limited.

 

From 1981 to 1986, Javid attended Downend School, a state comprehensive near Bristol. At school it was recommended that he should be a TV repairman. Javid has said he was told that he couldn't study maths at O Level so he had to get his father to pay for it.

Speaking in 2014, Javid said that while at school: "I was naughty, more interested in watching Grange Hill than homework".[6] After being told by his school that he could only study two A Levels when he believed he needed three to go to university,[8][better source needed] Javid subsequently attended Filton Technical College from 1986 to 1988, and finally the University of Exeter from 1988 to 1991.

politics is becoming populist now and that means people with merit have no place there and, if populism holds, not in the country also. 

He is not going to become PM. Not because he is not a likeable character but that tories will be sunk thanks to Cummings n Boris. His time in politics is done. 

Is Exeter not still considered a top rank? 

My first boss in law went to Exeter, altho she did medicine I think.  She would be aghast to learn this.  

Also didnt chakrabarty go to Exeter?  

Just lol btw @ that.

Merit lol.  A toadying, bankrupt nothing.  What's the merit in being clever if you apply none of it and sell your country down the river in the blink of an eye for the sniff of a better job?  An absolute scumbag.

Yes tardquin he certainly has made the country a better place.  What a shame his stellar political career has been so cruelly cut down with him in his prime.

Speaking in 2014, Javid said that while at school: "I was naughty, more interested in watching Grange Hill than homework".

Surely every child growing in the 80s was more interested in watching grange hill than homework?

Exeter was only fairly recently admitted to the Russell Group . I always thought it was occupied by academically average braying upper middle class sorts from the Home Counties , who couldn’t get in to uni of London.  Durham , Bristol .

TBH, people who've worked their way up without a stellar background are usually odious twots. Academic gongs are at least an objective mark of some form of verified merit. Most self-made people without conventionally elite quals have done it through a combination of slogging (which at least has some merit), sharking toadying and, worst, "networking" ie being good at kissing syphilitic arse.

Tell you who's self-made in this way: Grant Shapps. What an oaf.

Then there's the fact that the very act of becoming self-made tends to turn people into smug self-congratulatory twots who forget where they've come from and tend to think that since they did it, anyone who doesn't must just be a loser.

Go to oxbridge, get a good degree, join the right graduate scheme and look smart in a suit fgs.

"I always thought it was occupied by academically average braying upper middle class sorts from the Home Counties"

So what made u think City bankers would not come from there?

"TBH, people who've worked their way up without a stellar background are usually odious twots."

You couldn't be more wrong. 

I worked with a Sr Partner at a well established city firm (with all the bells and whistles you can think of) and he rose from the post room at the firm to being the Sr Partner, then managing partner and now continues to be on the committee. 

He is also a brilliant lawyer and actually sought out by top clients when other partners with tinsel qualifications (and properly verified) fook it up. 

All that aside he is also a humble man. 

Not really trolling I went to a comp and my 'career advice' was to do manual work or a basic trade

So did I and I don’t recall anything like that - though even if that were the case it would hardly be evidence in favour of the statement that the English teaching profession “yearns” for people to fail would it.

Agree with chimp.

Demonising teachers is a favourite hobby of the anti-intellectual Right.

TBH, with most people of the Toothickfor University / University of Life sort, if they really were told they were thick and good for nothing at school - which obviously they weren't in 99.9999999999999999999999999999999% of cases - then it was probably true, and the fact that they've since fluked some success doesn't change that.

Javid should have become a TV repair man - better than being the shite politician he is.

"I worked with a Sr Partner at a well established city firm (with all the bells and whistles you can think of) and he rose from the post room at the firm to being the Sr Partner:

No u didn't

being a tv repairman is honest work

being a twitching, swivel-eyed apologist for fraudulent society-raping thatcherite schemes isn’t 

I think he would probably (with some justification) claim that he just invented mortgage-backed securities and his team collectively also invented CLOs/CDOs, which were in themselves, at the time, not unhelpful innovations.

It was Wall St that decided to totally cane the arse out of that particular product area and come up with ever more ridiculous, in fact obscene (or as they say in New York, sophisticated) repackagings of the underlying idea.

But he would say that, wouldn't he? After all, it''s not like he rose to be vice chairman and the traders he trained created an entire industry between themselves at multiple other institutions. Oh wait yes, that's exactly what he did.

 

Credit derivatives, at least CDS, were JPM who are now BlueMountain, the CEO of which is the former lawyer of that JPM group.

Exeter, Durham, Bristol were the default choices after oxbridge. Then a side pocket of London unis for those who had their own houses at 18 and wanted to live The Life.

In Fool's Gold, Gillian Tett's paean to Bill Winters, doesn't she claim that it was JPM who created the CDO squared, but then stepped away from it because they couldn't quantify/manage the risk?  And then Lehmans picked up the baton and ran and ran and ran (gleefully chased by Bear Stearns, Deutsche, Morgan Stanley, Barcap etc).

It's a long time since I read it, but I seem to recall she argues that the only people who fully understood how these products worked were a handful of lawyers.  And by "handful of lawyers" I think she meant Yvonne Siew at A&O.

Don't recall the specifics, but yes Blythe Masters was the head of Credit Derivatives until the crash, then she took over Commodities. Ferociously impressive person, by all accounts (even if her career is arguably tarnished by the role of credit derivatives in the GFC and JPM's none-too glorious exit from the physical commodities space later on).

I think they simply couldn't model the product in order to quantify the risk, so they sensibly concluded that they should steer clear of it. Tett's book is quite darkly amusing in how it portrays JPM's credit and management scratching their heads trying to figure out how the other banks were pricing the risk, thinking that they themselves must be somehow stupid for not being able to do so.

Laz, mate - point taken re books on finance generally, but if you haven’t read Michael Lewis’ books you’ve missed out. He’s a very engaging writer.

Also writes well about sport (Moneyball is great on baseball and I have zero interest in baseball otherwise).

But Liar’s Poker, The Big Short, The Global Meltdown Tour and Flash Boys are genuinely entertaining journalistic pieces about some of the crazy stuff investment banks and their clients get up to.

He did quite a good Desert Island Discs a little while back. Just comes across as a really nice guy, curious, engaged, amused and in some cases appalled by what he’s writing about but a bit like Louis Theroux he’s got a style that enables you not just to understand clearly the topic he’s writing about (which can be rather esoteric/dry in the hands of others) but that also exposes the underlying humanity and motivations of the characters involved. 

Fascinating and insightful.

"The bankruptcy of the English teaching profession".

I agree.

'The Saj' is not my cup of tea, a terrible SSHD, but it seems he was held back by small-town, racist careers teachers. 'Careers' teachers, indeed. Any teacher could be parachuted into such a sincecure, and, frankly, many careers  'teechers' seem to be embittered types. 'Know your place', rather than carpe diem, seems to be their mantra.

I did a summer internship and a year in between my bachelors and masters working on the credit trading desk at Goldman Sachs.  I then went on to work at a tech company, so my involvement with the credit derivatives world was brief.

I was involved in a CDO^2 transaction and a few other exotic "structured" trades.  I had no fvcking clue what was going on and assumed the people I was working with were much smarter than me.  Turns out this was not the case!

I subsequently came top of my year in Econometrics at Cambridge.  The imposter syndrome has gone.

 

Vertigo - that sounds a bit like my internship with DB in London sitting with currency futures desk looong time ago.
Good experience all in all. Enough to be of some help in my current role but not enough to become a trader  

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