Delhi Bombay Bank (DBB) is famous for many things. This Bank, for example, only hires women who have oversized balls and that is one reason why there is no sexual harassment of women in this bank; all women in this bank have bigger balls than any male employee.

It is a blue blooded German bank where nine out of ten employees are Indian; in spirit at least. They renamed the bank DBB a few years ago when the Global Head of Global Markets, whose division contributes roughly 50% of the bank's total revenue, threatened to walk out if he didn't get a hundred million dollars in bonus and the bank was not given an Indian name.

Now you must be wondering who told me all this. Well, Robbie Longhandle did. Robbie has been with DBB for the past thirty five years and is currently head of sales, trading, structuring, M&A, leveraged finance, risk advisory and a couple hundred other functions. Mostly however, he is into espionage and overseas a 50,000 strong team, all working undercover, running global espionage services in banking and finance. He is Chinese but doesn't look like one; though at first glance he may look Chinese if you look carefully and keep staring at his face for a while, you'll see that he is a mix between Hispanic, Indian, and Caucasian. In fact, the Americans claim that he is American and the Chinese claim that he is Chinese. Officially, Robbie lives in London but he is to be found everywhere, wherever the bank has its presence. Now you must be wondering how I know Robbie.

As I said, Robbie works undercover at DBB and I met him in one of those Euromoney conferences. He wanted to recruit me but somehow ended up getting recruited by me; for money? Hell no! In a ten minute conversation with me he found out that we have better machinery for espionage than DBB and our costs, to support that espionage, is about a million times less than his bank's. I think he wanted to infiltrate my team to learn the techniques.

Since that fateful meeting, Robbie has told me amazing stories about DBB. Recently he told me that a couple of hundred senior employees of DBB have been sent on sabbatical; and one of them was my good friend Rahul M, my namesake. Sending a banker away on sabbatical is actually to fire him; and the process is supposed to induce a lot of pain. I was speechless. Oh, sweet Jesus! Why? He wouldn't give the details. All he would say was that it all started late last year because the Germans got very pissed with the Indians for some reason and since the drama was unfolding in the U.K., pretty close to Robbie's residence at Great Winchester Street, the Brits couldn't decide if they wanted the curry more than the bratwurst. Now, this was not enough for me. I needed more information.

So I took Robbie to Lan Kwai Fung and got him drunk on ballbuster. Ballbuster is a drink, which is 10% gin, 10% vodka, 10% rum, 5% whisky, 5% grape juice, 2% tomato juice, 1% coconut paste and 57% water. There is a legend surrounding the invention of this drink. It seems that sometimes in the year 2000, a hot shot investment banker named Al Boon Say was bragging to a bartender named Crost at the Bull Dog in Lan Kwai Fung about how he and his team could synthesize the most complex structured products from any and every asset class and sell it to ultra rich grandmothers and invalids and make them feel as if they were buying daily groceries from the supermarket. Crost, the bartender, after listening to this mumbo-jumbo for an hour said that it was no big deal. He can do better than the banker and his team right there and then. This pissed off Al Boon Say who challenged him to prove himself.

Crost concocted the drink, Ballbuster, on the spot and gave it to the banker. What happened after that is a bit blurry. It seems after doing the bottoms up the banker went totally silent. He couldn't figure out whether he became high on the drink or his brain cells got busted. In fact, he became sober and for the first time that night he saw the world around him for what it was.

Legend has it that with his characteristic style Crost had told Al Boon that night that it was all water in the end and the next time he pisses in front of the grandmothers and invalids, rich or otherwise, he should always think of the drink ballbuster.

Anyway, I am digressing. That night I couldn't get Robbie drunk on ballbuster after all. He told me quite causally that before he joined the bank he had surgically removed his balls so that they don't come in the harms way. But there is always some upside when you are dealing with Robbie. You're bound to get something out of him.

Before I got Robbie drunk on Ballbuster, I told him the story of this drink's invention by the enterprising bartender, Crost. He was so impressed by it that he wanted to meet with Crost. I told him that it's been so many years now and the last time I checked, my sources told me that Crost had set up a hedge fund with a couple of fugitives from the U.S. in Pyongyang, North Korea (Oh yes, that is the last of the last frontier for investors and Crost and his partners wanted to get there first). Robbie would still not give up. He then insisted that we track down Al Boon Say and arrange a meeting with him.

I informed him that to the best of my knowledge Al Boon Say was working for DBB somewhere pretty close to the equator.

Robbie immediately took out his blackberry, which actually was not a blackberry but a contraption that was spherical in shape and was made of glass, and after staring at it for a few seconds he said that he now knows who Al Boon Say is. Al was, is, in fact another double agent who works for the same agency as Robbie and has been on DBB's payroll since the sixties.

Note: This is not a research or analyst report. This is personal blog. Risk Latte Company and/or any of its members, including the author of this blog, is not a registered investment advisor. We do not advise anyone to buy, sell or invest in gold unless he or she has taken advice from a registered investment advisor or bank.

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