American Bankers Association - ABA

What is a merchant bank? Well there's the theoretical manner

in which the merchant bank came to the party and that was largely by providing [merchant bank partying in a disco club]

payment options escrow currency hedges and other means of spraying wd-40 on the [merchant bank holding escrow papers]

international tracts when American corporations did business with merchants [WD40 sprayed on train tracks]

from other countries well the basic idea then was that a merchant bank lived and [foreign merchants shaking hands]

breathed the banking international transaction universe and knew every [banks play pong across world map]

trick in the book when dealing with shady countries who had hoped that they

could get some gullible American corporation to ship them twenty five

thousand yellow and orange rubber duckies with the squeaky sound thingies [rubber duckies getting squeezed in the tub]

yeah and then somehow abscond without paying well the duck seller was schooled

in molding rubber they were not schooled in international financial transactions

so back then it made perfect sense for the duck maker to hire the merchant bank [merchant bank enters screen with duck maker]

to deal with international escrow complexities far beyond their core skill

and the way they hired them is basically the merchant bank would discount the

bill that was owed to them and pay that money in cash in American u.s. dollars [money changing hands]

to that American corporation and the bank would then be responsible for [bank choking international seller]

collecting the full price and that spread between the full bill and what

they paid the American company was how they made money well in the process of

being deep in both the strategic operations of companies in the US and in

understanding how the global marketplace for Commerce work merchant banks evolved

into more or less one flavor or another of an investment bank helping clients [merchant bank bulding turns into investment bank]

sell debt and equity and other money raising devices so that they could

continue selling ducks or rakes or tractors or lawn flamingo's yeah those [rubber duckies floating by]

are cute in the modern incarnation of merchant banks while many are actually [merchant bank throws bags of money to businessman]

able to not just advise but invest in the companies to whom they are close all

kinds of other complexities live in the border-to-border transactions and [merchant bank sends money to Mexico]

because the personal relationships of the merchant bankers themselves ended up

getting so close to the management into the government's they do [group of government officials]

with into the competitive marketplaces well each of which carried enormous

friction and merchant banks and the bankers who run them have found

themselves in the middle of all kinds of commercial transactions yeah very

lucrative business today people if you want to whine about taxes go into this

one so today merchant banking is really more

like just banking with fewer regulations and a whole lot more upside when they're

right and of course the most successful merchant banks are the ones that you

know offer merch [merchant bank wearing merch clothes]