Bob Diamond is no quitter.
The American-born bond trader took a job as head of global markets at Barclays’s floundering investment banking arm, BZW, back in 1996. Barely a year later the British bank sold BZW’s equity and corporate finance business to rival Credit Suisse First Boston for a pittance. Equity markets were soaring at the time, and the City of London was booming, but Barclays didn’t have the stomach — or the capital — to compete in the investment banking business against the giants of Wall Street and continental Europe.
Far from giving up, however, Diamond dedicated himself to building up his rump markets business, renamed Barclays Capital, insisting that the firm could thrive as a niche fixed-income player. He spent aggressively to recruit a cadre of bond specialists from bulge-bracket firms and quickly made Barcap the dominant player in sterling bonds. Then...
