My stint in I-Banking

I worked summer before last at a company called Calyon Corporate and Investment Bank. It’s a French based I-Bank that’s headquarters (last I checked) was 1301 Avenue of the Americas, Manhattan, New York. I worked in the Global Fixed Income, Debt Capital Markets department for a man named Ron Krolick. I heard about his bonus check for that year at Christmas…it contained 7 zeros… money money money money money money money money money money money money money money :-D.

Anyway, I started early summer as a 10 week intern for them in that department and to say the least, I did not really have any idea what I was getting into. I had been well prepared by my education to handle calculating most anything they could ask me to do, discounted cash flows, credit analysis, economic analysis, etc. First day I was there, met a very nice guy who was my first direct boss, Javier Carballo. Smart as hell and knew what he was doing. He instantly liked me for one very simple reason…I spoke English lol.

My first real work came when he handed me a big….BIG…Stack of paper and told me “this is what we do, take a look through and try to get familiar with our operation”. Basically, the stack was a print out of about 10 PowerPoint presentations that he gave to his most recent clients about debt issuances. He was happy to know I understood everything he gave me.

After I had nearly memorized the presentations I got bored; thing was, that department never really had a short term intern before so they didn’t know what to give me. I ended up making rounds around the floor asking everyone there if they had any work for me to do… I’m sure I got annoying lol. Pablo, Javier, Laurent, and a bunch of other people used to give me some small research work around the office but nothing significant. Eventually, I think I annoyed them so much they started giving me real work to shut me up; I think they were pleasantly surprised when they found out I could both do the work well and do it damn fast.

Laurent was the first to really give me some good calculation work, I helped with the News Corp building real estate transaction they had. Evidently, they wanted to sell the building and relocate their headquarters for over a billion. Laurent asked me to run the rent roll for the whole building…I carried it out to about 2037, about 20 years longer than he expected. The broker was being a broker though and the info he gave us had some problems with it; basically it was the truth told aslant. Neglected to mention a few things in a few places and I had to go back a few times to do the work. Turns out, the numbers did work to well, not much could justify the billion dollar price tag. Don’t know whatever happened to it.

This’ll be part 1 of 2, cause I got a lot to say on the subject.