The Anonymous Widower

“Banking Will Be The Mining Industry of the Nineties”

My old friend and bank manager, David,  said that quote about 1995 or so. At the time he had just been promoted to Business Banking Director of Lloyds Bank.  One day, I’ll tell everybody about the rest of that lunch, but I suspect that some of the guilty are still involved in banking.

What I would say,  and I know others will agree, although one has now joined David as one of the Devil’s right hand men, is that there never ever was another bank manager who was as good as David, when it came to guiding and nurturing companies from inception to stardom.  In some ways though, he was a rogue.  But he was always a rogue on the side of the angels.

He had seen banks at all levels and knew that they were massively overstaffed and that the only way in his view they could survive and prosper was by cutting out the deadwood.  He told me that what had happened to the miners would happen again to workers in the banking industry.

And then yesterday, Lloyds announced a lot of job losses.

So David was eventually right, but he had seen the writing on the wall all those years ago.

July 1, 2011 - Posted by AnonW | Finance, News | Banks