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 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 would therefore be a takeover by a German automotive 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 pointless and utterly destructive 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, which also eventually failed, defaulting on billions of euros of syndicated long term financing in the process (all under the rubric of, you guessed it, “Project Eurotunnel”).