Maybe it was the slow news day that inspired Mark Gilbert of Bloomberg News last Friday to engage in an exercise of defining investment banks in terms of musical groups. Admittedly, it takes talent of sorts to come up with some of these designations. For example, Gilbert compares No.1 Goldman Sachs to the Rolling Stones, since it is “unloved by its peers and universally regarded as arrogant” with “its unrivaled profit-generating abilities” that “arouse jealousy and admiration in equal number.” Citigroup got paired with Ozzy Osbourne, who, says Gilbert “is growing old disgracefully,” what with “many and varied brushes with the authorities around the world” that make it “worthy of an alliance with the former Black Sabbath singer.”

Deutsche Bank was linked to Fleetwood Mac because of “years of infighting and not communicating with one another.” As for two other giants of their respective fields, Gilbert opines, “Both Merrill Lynch & Co. and Madonna peaked in the 1980s and have been irrelevant since the 1990s, notwithstanding umpteen attempts at reinvention.” To round out the others of the 10 listed, Gilbert compares JPMorgan Chase to Radiohead, Barclays Capital to Oasis, Morgan Stanley to Coldplay, UBS to Phil Collins, Commerzbank to David Hasselhoff, and HSBC to ”any boyband.”