Blain’s Morning Porridge Dec 4^th, 2025 – Hans-Jeorg Rudloff could teach us much about markets…

“When the Eurobond market exploded, it made London the centre of the world…”

This is not an obituary – but a story about markets. Hans-Jeorg Rudloff, who passed away earlier this week, was the dominant figure of the Eurobond market. His insights and vision were extraordinary – understanding how markets worked, how to dominate them, and setting the foundations for today’s $120 trillion global market!

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Yesterday one of my chums and market mentors called me with the news Hans-Jeorg Rudloff, one of the founding fathers of the Euromarkets, had passed away on Monday. Between us, my friend and I must have over 90 years of market experience, but we both owe our careers and success to the market that Rudloff and a small number of others created.

In 1985 – when I first started bothering my betters in finance – the Eurobond market funded around $165 bln in new debt. It was young and developing – the rules were being made up as it developed, but it was tremendously exciting. In its first 2 decades (from 1963) the Euro-market had grown from zero to 10% of global market debt capacity of a couple of trillion dollars!

Today, the Global bond markets are a $120 trillion plus phenomena! There are multiple subsets of the fixed income markets – most of which thrive. Asia is set to overtake the USA as the largest component of fixed income flows later this decade.

Hans-Jeorg will be remembered primarily as the Chieftain of the most successful Eurobond firm, Credit Suisse First Boston. I use the word chieftain rather than king deliberately – there was a certain lawlessness and war-band mentality to the way we played markets back then. Like all great financial innovators, he understood conventions and rules were there to be tested rather than adhered to. Regulations were less of a thing back then.

We played by different rules. Feathers were regularly ruffled – the concept of a “toxic working environment” would have seen us erupt in hysterical laughter. One joke that was told about Rudloff was how everyone was his friend, except anyone who’d ever worked for him – he drove them hard and fast, accepting no excuses and taking no prisoners.

In the 1980s, the Eurobond market was the fastest growing and most exciting arena in finance. The big banks competed for mandates and to top the all-important league tables of who won the most deals. Some banks, most notably the Japanese, effectively bought market share, but Credit Suisse First Boston didn’t have to. It was always near the top, but based on its’ skill, knowledge and contacts. One of Rudloff’s many talents was to ensure everyone regarded his firm as the go-to Eurobond firm.

Rudloff swiftly became the most powerful lord of the fast-evolving markets. He led the market forward at time when ideas, innovation and new ways of addressing risk and returns were admired rather than feared. He’s spotted how CSFB could became leader of the increasingly competitive market, by bidding aggressively for mandates. He did that by coordinating knowledge of what investors would buy, the price of secondary debt, by dominating the new swap market (which got issuers the best funding rates), and solid banking relationships. He was able to pull these parts together with the result CSFB could place millions of dollars of debt before mid-morning while every other firm was still scrambling to figure out what had happened the day before.

Rudloff’s success came because he made the CSFB a placement machine. Many other firms never worked out how to break down the silos between all the component skills needed for market success.

He understood a whole new financial ecosystem was developing to service the growing global bond market, primarily in London. The best salesmen, traders, syndicate managers and originators (the bankers covering borrowers) were enticed about and well rewarded. Salaries exploded across the market. The best market lawyers – scavengers will always find the best pickings – flocked to the sector. Even financial journalism (I was at Euromoney from 1987-89) became respectable! All of which fuelled London’s glory years post Big Bang in 1986.

The vison and foresight of the giants of the Eurobond market like Stanilas Yassukovich, Stanley Ross, Michael Von Clemm, Ossie Gruebel, Robert Grey, et al are legendary, yet Hans-Jeorge towered over them despite being small of stature. He was first among equals. (Sorry for any names I may have missed on that list.)

Rudloff’s career was interesting. He’s been involved since the early days of the market – joining Credit Suisse two years after Warburg launched the first ever $15mm Eurobond for Italian road operator, Autostrade in 1963. He returned from a stint in the USA with Kidder Peabody in 1980 to rejoin and run CSFB as his personal fiefdom.

By the 1990s the market was maturing and its possible he’d upset too many people at Credit Suisse. He saw fertile new pastures emerge in post-Communist Russia, founding an investment bank he flipped to BBL after a few years, while becoming a board advisor to many Russian firms. He must have seen the writing on the wall and came back to London, becoming an elder statesman of the markets at Barclays.

When he finally retired from Barclays in 2014 in his 70’s, he was still at the top of his game. His unparalleled Rolodex of contacts meant he’d likely been the firm’s biggest revenue generator, but I reckon he’d figured how markets were changing.

The days of big personalities were passing, and following the global financial crisis of 2008, European banks like Barclays had been neutered by over-regulation, proscriptive capital rules, and increasing bureaucracy. The days of buccaneering financial entrepreneurism were over. Charismatic bankers like Rudloff, and his protégé Bob Diamond, were no longer the kind of leader’s European regulators wanted to see in positions of power and influence.

It spelled the end of London’s dominance of markets –  “they” wanted banks to be run by committees, composed of accountants, compliance officers and professional managers – many with no trading floor expertise, no hard-won banking relationships, and certainly not the “fleet-of-thought” and “something-of-the-night” derring-do that has won mandates, and created transactional opportunities in the glory days. Banks were managed to capital rules and ratios. Around that time a good chum, then chairman of one of Europe’s biggest banks, told me his job was to keep the regulators happy.

Not so in the USA, where banks were released swiftly from regulatory constraints after 2008 and new games emerged in Private Capital Markets. While European firms kept looking over the shoulders, new American hedge funds, Alternative Asset Managers and Investment Management Firms exploded into scale and influence – and are now the biggest firms in finance. 2 decades on from the GFC, Europe lacks any financial institutions of similar scale or heft to Blackrock or Apollo.

Financial mavericks still exist – but none will rise to the top of European financial institutions in our lifetimes. It’s a mindset issue – European institutions are run to the book – which are written by the regulators. Skilled financiers can still tell great stories, plan and execute grand stratagems, and sell their narratives, but banks no longer run markets. Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan still allow a shallow cult of leadership personalities… We hang on every utterance from Jamie Dimon, and even Goldman’s DJ moonlighting as CEO gets occasional notice. It saddens me to see how some US financiers have prostituted themselves to politics. Trade Secretary Lutnick’s legacy to markets will likely be the memory of a sycophantic clown show.

Back in the early 1980s I was small fry, a go-for at Morgan Stanley and then a journalist at Euromoney. Yet Rudloff took time to speak to me and would patiently explain how things worked… (placing stories as he saw them play to his advantage!) Even after we blew open a story about how much his bank had made from the Republic of Italy on an early bond market swap, he’d still give me and a small number of other writers the stories he wanted us to be telling – even as we thought we were breaking new ground in investigative financial insights. When I was offered a job at a leading US bank a few years later, I’m pretty sure it was because they’d read me quoting Rudloff in a story explaining how a deal worked.

The bottom line was Rudloff smiled, planted and reaped the market! Nothing wrong with that.  Salesman, trader, leader..

These were great days. Markets today are very different… but still……. interesting…

Out of time, and back to the day job…

Bill Blain

CEO – Windshift Capital

Author – The Morning Porridge

Partner – Shard Capital

Special Advisor – Spitfire Strategic Capital