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, tiresome, speaks to a yearning for a livelihood less dreary than the one they have fallen into, and generally fails in its general purpose: either the Project name wittily references the subject matter of the deal, meaning anyone with a knack for cryptic crosswords or acrostics will work out what the deal must be about, or it will inadvertently portend the financial outcome of the transaction. Project Verdun was a takeover by a German automotive manufacturer of an underperforming French one that yielded none of the “synergies” its architects intended, but instead wound up engaging both target and acquirer in a prolonged, pointless and utterly destructive 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, a joint venture which also eventually failed, defaulting on billions of euros of syndicated long term financing (all under the rubric of, you guessed it, “Project Eurotunnel”).