I don’t want to start an ugly trend. It simply does not make sense from a triple bottom line perspective.

So I downloaded an old Bank of Baroda presentation from the Dufresne KMS intra-site. And I modified everything to look like a Lederman best practices deck. There are too many brown Indian people in the photographs. But nobody in Lederman will notice.

Not checking at all. But Bore Atlantic is now trading 10% down for the day. CNBC fellow is still very very bullish.

14 July 2007

4.34 p.m.

Thank god I don’t care at all. Because it looks like Bore Atlantic is going to go bankrupt. It is the single biggest news on all the websites and TV stations. Apparently they are incurring heavy losses on US housing market investments.

Andre was such an idiot. I should have never listened to him. Should have done my own fundamental and technical research. Too late now.

Most banking stocks are doing terribly. Lederman is down 18%.

Besides the Dufresne team, almost everyone here is panicking. Hassan says Lederman had perhaps a couple of billion dollars invested in US housing. The damage isn’t too bad right now. But Lederman is much, much smaller than Bore. If Bore can go bankrupt …

Obviously, even in this moment of nothingness, James Mair still finds something to be enthusiastic about. (WHAT THE FUCK DUDE!)

He asked all the associates and analysts if we should rework all our data and decks keeping in mind the market slump and drop in Lederman share price.

For the first time, except during the LLTLF show, Kurt made a spontaneous noise. He got up, looked at James and said, in his usual robotic tone, that if James made us write one more line, create one more slide or open one more spreadsheet, in order to cater to his perverse sense of enthusiasm, Kurt would kill him right there, in the conference room, with his bare hands. We waited for Kurt to laugh or smile or something. But he just looked at James, without blinking, for one full minute.

James left. Kurt sat down and continued working. I briefly thought of cracking a joke to diffuse the tension in the conference room. But then what if Kurt did something violent?

(In any case the joke that popped into my head was this:

Q: Why did Keanu Reeves see stars and cows and dogs all around him?

A: Because he was stuck in the BCG Matrix!

Ha ha ha ha. Excellent. But that was not the time for it. Noting it in my joke book.)

The next one week is going to be so boring. But better to get back to India than sit here nervously hoping Tom does not say anything about Dominic or me.

6.33 p.m.