City Voices

Hope for Howard: the 'people impact' at HBOS

"Undoubtedly, we will have some redundancies, some overlap, but the way we have dealt with this in the past in both organisations has really been with voluntary redundancies, attrition, and so on so I think the people impact, if you will, is going to be very minimal."

Eric Daniels, Lloyds TSB chief executive, plays down compulsory redundancy fears

If only Wall St had asked China

"The US crisis today would be China's tomorrow if financial products such as securitisation are introduced without proper risk-controlled measures."

Wu Xiaoling, former central bank deputy governor

The secret of Lloyds' future success

"Oh we're still boring"

Mr Daniels offers an inspirational vision of the merged company

What? Us? Responsible? Part 1

"Only a fool would imagine short selling has any effect on these companies at all."

Simon Cawkwell, short-seller

What? Us? Responsible? Part 2

"I don't blame any one person. If you look at what happened in the US, that accelerated the breakdown in wholesale funding. The last few days made us keen to speed up conversations."

Andy Hornby, Hbos chief executive, ignores the fact that quite a few people blame him

Fuld feels his employees’ pain

"This has been very painful on all of you, both personally and financially. For this, I feel horrible.'"

Dick Fuld, Lehman Brothers chief executive, pours out his soul

Sympathy for 'The Gorilla'

"On that conference call, his voice was broken. I have never heard him like that. He spoke by rote."

Lehman Brothers banker on Mr Fuld

And one for the pub: Time for some liquid investments

If you had purchased £1,000 of Northern Rock shares one year ago it would now be worth £4.95, with HBOS, earlier this week your £1,000 would have been worth £16.50, and £1000 invested in XL Leisure would now be worth less than £5, but if you bought £1,000 worth of Tennents Lager one year ago, drank it all, then took the empty cans to an aluminium re-cycling plant, you would get £214. So based on the above statistics the best current investment advice is to drink heavily.