Andrea Leadsom - please stand for leadership!

[Millyonthefloss2]

Anyone agree?

Not sure why some of you enjoy hanging out on this thread - finding things to discredit about her.

I want her to win. Don't care for Theresa at all and don't want Gove.

Guys - Not going to out myself here... but AL was a glorified PA.

Even her actual job title is, we are told, misleading. Someone must have decided it was not misleading enough! It wouldn't be my nail in her coffin, though, if she had only ever deliberately stated her official job title. My nail in her coffin was her jumping on the leave bandwagon and embracing their sound bites rather than using the public debates to show that she had an ounce of intelligence and understanding of what she was campaigning for. There were plenty of intelligent arguments either side could have used, but she sure as hell wasn't one of the people using them!

This might help. I knew the guy who wrote the below professionally. I think he has also commented in the Daily Fail and such.

reaction.life/was-andrea-leadsom-really-such-a-city-hotshot/

I don't think Leadsom exaggerated particularly heinously

?? She was basically admin.

She got a job as a junior treasury minister on the basis of apparently having had some experience of finance.

I found the soundbites irritating too but that's politicians for you!

Apparently, most people aren't able to absorb much detail. So, if you do a presentation, you have to decide what message you'd like them to get and then focus on getting them to remember that - hence all the strap lines etc. I think its the same school of thought that drives politicians to deliver the same bland phrases over and over until you think you could punch them if they utter the phrase again! (Remember " we are the party for hard working people"?)

no, that wasn't an admin job. Admin is trade settlements and valuations.
It sounds more like a bridge between compliance and investment management

What people don't understand is that in the UK, once upon a time, job titles were handed out almost on a "what job title do you want" basis, if you had been at a company long enough - even in finance.

That has all changed, of course - particularly when said British firms get acquired by an American company (as in Leadsom's case) and you actually have to justify the job titles that you have.

snowbells - have you any idea how many Vice Presidents there are at US banks? its the equivalent of director at UK financial insitutions and there are an awful lot of directors. I was one.

Vri123

Don't believe everything you read. "Glorified PA" is what many people who knew AL professionally call her.

I have encountered quite a few people who were "Head of Governance" and weren't really... particularly at smaller firms / those that have yet to be bought up by larger global companies.

Vri123

I'm not going to out myself, but I am in finance. And I know AL's old company quite well.

Invesco globally has $780 billion dollars of assets under management. Its one of the biggest in the world.
Yes, there are some piddling little fund managers - the Guernsey based one that Andrea Leadsom worked at before Invesco was one, but Invesco is massive.

me too - and I don't want to out myself either!

Shall we both step away from the keyboard on AL's time at Invesco? This feels a little uncomfortable suddenly!

According to Stephens her role at Barclay was 'largely administrative' involving the maintenance of contractual relationships with other banks. At Perpetual, where he himself worked, she was essentially PA to the CIO, negotiating pay terms for senior fund managers, among other things.

Sorry, I didn't see your post at 10.18.

I'd say a smidge of compliance and no investment management, by the sound of it.

Vri123

I know very well how much Invesco manages. But the Invesco that AL worked for - particularly in her early days - was still the old guard (i.e. Perpetual). Perpetual was bought up by Invesco in 2000... and it took years for this acquisition to be reflected in the actual business (as it always does). Fund managers remained, but the way it's managed now is very different. It has become a lot more international since, and job titles can actually be rejected by the head office in the US.

This is very difficult to explain without insider information!

I thought it was 1998?? At least that's what i remember

2000 was when it was officially bought up.

Its just I remember seeing Riccardo Ricciardi and the Perpetual CIO in June 1998 together in the office.

Anyway, most people do not know this level of detail about how investment mgmt is run. Most people don't even know what investment management is. So, the question is, if AL gets through Thursday, will this be enough for the Tory membership to not vote for her?

and I am going to name change very soon!

Acquisitions take a while to become 'official'. Official stance was 2000. Anyway, will likely name change soon, too.

British politics is too close for comfort.

V interesting conversations and speculations going on about AL and her actual banking experience.

A couple of thoughts from me. Nick Leeson says he wishes he had had even a decent junior compliance officer overseeing him properly and his whole debacle would have been avoided.

Fred "the shred" Goodwin did not have significant banking experience before he was put in charge of RBS. He had the relevant job title to take to a future career, just not to avoid breaking the banking system first.

Investment bankers are not the people to put in charge of managing risk. They are recruited based on their abnormally high risk appetite. The boring admin people are the ones who stop them "betting the house".

Its true, but investment banks make - and lose - vast amounts of money. Fund managers take miniscule, incremental bets usually against a benchmark, and usually their fees come from taking a fixed % of AUM (assets under mgmt) each year.

Hedge funds take much bigger, more aggressive positions but AL was in the low risk, traditional fund mgmt side.

And risk is managed every which way you can imagine.