This will damage the relationship
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Risk Anatomy™
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Another of our rote flaggen when a negotiation is heading into the buffers, someone might cry: if this doesn’t get done this will potentially end, damage, compromise, impair or somehow besmirch an “incredibly important relationship”.
Out of the mouths...
As with all things, how egregious such a piece of bluster is depends on the context: on who is saying it to whom and when.
Sales
Now, if your own Salesperson says this, you may take a pinch of snuff, fling it over your shoulder and carry on regardless. This is what all sales people say, about everything. You may mutter something in response, like “sure, and I’m dating Christina Aguilera,” and just stick to whatever you are doing.
The worst a salesperson can do is snitch on you to senior relationship management, and the consequences of that are rather like, as Dennis Healey once said of being criticised by Geoffrey Howe, “being savaged by a dead sheep”, albeit a fragrant one.
All SRMs do — all they can do — is smarm around, reeking of Kouros and hair tonic, pestering you, trying to schmooze you into de-escalation. It is up to you how long you can hold out.
Risk
If your risk people worry about the client relationship, there is more cause for nerves. You should be very afraid.
The client relationship is something the risk team, properly, directed, should not really care about. If they do their job well, the relationship will respect them. In any case they should not let client happiness considerations cloud their priorities: their day job is not taking too much risk. Carrying out their sacred function is bound to aggravate some clients: exactly the ones, as a rule, it is most important want to take to much risk to.
Risk people do not often say this sort of thing, of course. When they do it tends to make the FT. Eventually.
Here is the thing: a $20 million annual wallet is all well and good, but if you lose five and a half yards trying to hold on to it, friends, 'you have done a very bad trade.
Counterparty
If your counterparty says this, also stiffen. This suggests she has run out of good arguments for whatever her position happens to be. A counterparty who means it will never tell you she is thinking about ending the relationship. She will just ghost you. It is rather like teen romance. If she hotly insists this could be the end of everything it is almost certainly a bluff.
If you really are off-market, a counterparty has two options: one: trade at a better level away from you. Two: don’t trade at all. Either of those outcomes may or may not be accompanied by actual ghosting (which we think is much more likely to be interpersonal than economic, by the way. People end relationships because they think you are a douche, not because your levels are off by 5 basis points).