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DO WE sense winds of change blowing through the ivory towers of 1, Cabot Square, home from home of mighty Credit Suisse First Boston in London?
Are there sinister influences behind the recent games of musical chairs? Should Luther Terry's sweepers and undercover agents check the cellars to see whether a full scale gunpowder plot is being hatched by conspirators?
While we have been temporarily hors de combat we have not been blinded or mentally incapacitated.
The recent events at CSFB appear to us to be sending a very clear message - CSFP is quietly rolling up large parts of CSFB, and Chris Goekjian, with the total support of Allen Wheat in New York, is becoming the most powerful man in Europe.
Are we talking through our trousers or a cocked hat? Look at the facts yourselves. Because of its extraordinary profits record Credit Suisse Financial Products has become an elite group similar to the British SAS or the French Foreign Legion and answerable to almost no one.
Of course it helped that CSFP is Allen Wheat's baby and provides substantial earnings for Wheat and his close friends as well as the senior executives of CSFP, who have all become seriously rich.
Now it seems that Wheat has ordered CSFP to come out of the background and stamp its successful template on the whole of CSFB's international fixed income business.
Chris Goekjian, he of the blistering intellect and the man who has orchestrated CSFP's victory march, will pull the strings. The writing was already on the wall when Wheat and Goekjian asked CSFP veteran, Marcus Everard to take over CSFB's emerging markets operations. Everard had been with CSFP since the earliest days and was regarded by Wheat as one of the best managers in the whole CSFB group.
However, Marcus Everard was only the leader of the first CSFP wave. Before you could say "Was Shinji Yamada shortchanged on his bonus?" CSFP had sent in the second and third waves.
Trevor Price, a member of CSFP's crack management committee comprising Everard, Yamada, Paul Calello and Christopher Martin, was appointed to take over CSFB's global government cluster (no, not a bomb but a group). He reports directly to Marc Hotimsky, the CSFB superstar who certainly...