Word: semper
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...Rich kid from the Chicago suburbs. Six feet tall, 135 pounds, chip on his shoulder. Played Dungeons and Dragons as a kid and scrawled "Sic Semper Tyrannis" ?- the stale John Wilkes Booth motto ?- in his high school yearbook. Insisted on going by "August" because Benjamin sounded too Jewish, and told the cops once to call him "Erwin Rommel." Distributed racist and anti-Semitic literature at home and at school, had a girlfriend who does not remember him fondly. Scary? Sure. But he could have been on "Seinfeld," too. As a malcontent, Smith was little more than a caricature ?- until...
...RESONANT PHRASE] semper fidelis...
...SEMPER...
Those that don't will be casualties. McColl (who gives crystal hand grenades to prized employees) understood early on that one day banking was going to be like war. Call it semper finance. Says David Chaum, the visionary guru behind DigiCash, a Net-based currency: "What you find in retail banking today is that some banks see themselves as acquirers, and others see themselves as, well, acquirees." On the day the Travelers deal was announced--creating a giant with $42 billion in equity--vice presidents at still independent Goldman Sachs nervously fingered their E-mail with questions about when...
Consumers might find this terrifying, but the superbankers love it. Because their gigantic banks are "too large to fail," firms like the new BankAmerica and Citigroup will offer the safest possible havens for investors--safer, perhaps, than even government-printed money. In the end, what the semper financiers are after is not just new customers or new deposits but a kind of business immortality ensured by their gargantuan size and guaranteed by their killer technology. E-cash, wealth accounts and consumer derivatives will have made these firms as essential as cash itself once was. If business immortality can be purchased...