Project

Investment bankers delight in faux-secrecy, assigning Important and Confidential advistory transactions with project names so as to conceal their fundamental aspects in casual conversations around the firm and buttress their Chinese walls. - “Project Orange”, “Project Bassdrum”, “Project Fear” and so on.

It is all very childish, speaks to a yearning for a livelihood less dreary than the one they have fallen into, and will fail in its general purpose. Either:

• the project name wittily references the subject matter of the transaction, meaning anyone with a knack for cryptic crosswords or acrostics will work out what the deal must be about, or
• it will inadvertently portend its disastrous financial outcome.

On this second theory, Project Verdun would be a takeover by a German manufacturer of an underperforming French one that ended up yielding none of the “synergies” its architects intended, but instead obliged both target and acquirer to engage in a prolonged bout of cross-border cultural sniping for years, before the deal was eventually unwound with a leveraged buy-out of the French operation by a consortium of French and British interests, (executed under cover of — you guessed it — “Project Eurotunnel”) which by operation of the same hubris also failed, defaulting on its syndicated long term financing on a massive scale and creating billions of euros of zombie distressed debt to be handed joylessly around event-driven hedge funds for years to come.