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Few bankers are as closely associated with a single financial product as Hans-Jörg Rudloff. The Swiss-German banker might not have invented the eurobond, but he presided over its greatest period of growth — the 1980s — and dominated the hard-charging entrepreneurial firm that most embodied its spirit: Credit Suisse First Boston.
In some ways Rudloff, who has died at the age of 85, was an enigma. Despite spending his entire career in an industry often derided as cynical and greedy, he was also a visionary, believing sincerely in the power of finance to drive growth and improve people’s lives. “Capital markets have steered capital to all corners of this world and lifted billions of people out of poverty,” he said. It was a credo first formed on Wall Street in the late 1960s when, as a young bond salesman at Kidder Peabody, he witnessed the vigour and efficiency of New York’s financial markets, which he associated with the prosperity of American life.
This was a time when the US government, amid concerns about widening deficits during the Vietnam war, had slapped restrictions on exports of dollars. One unintended consequence was to spark into life a market centred in London but outside any national regulatory or tax control that shuffled offshore dollar deposits from investors into the hands of international corporations.
Rudloff moved back to Europe, keen to participate in this development, and in 1980 was recruited to a senior role at CSFB, then a new joint venture between Credit Suisse and the US investment bank First Boston. It was a propitious moment: the market was exploding, propelled by ever faster communications and the Thatcher-Reagan era rolling-back of currency controls.
Rudloff thrived in this highly competitive environment. For much of the 1980s, CSFB topped the league tables for eurobond issues. He acquired the sobriquet “king of the Euromarkets” for the invention of the “bought deal”. Instead of surveying the appetite of prospective investors before launching an issue, the underwriter would buy it outright, hoping to resell the bonds for a profit. Rudloff’s advantage, he once said, “was that I had permission to underwrite at 10 o’clock at night, whereas every other firm had to go to ten bloody committees to get any permission to underwrite anything”. It was a freedom he freely indulged, reportedly signing contracts over champagne at Annabel’s — a London nightclub of which he was an enthusiastic patron.
The one certainty in banking is that advantages conferred by innovation get whittled away, and by the end of the 1980s CSFB lost its lead to giant Japanese banks. The firm descended into infighting, some of it blamed on Rudloff’s confrontational style (he cheerfully described himself as “a bit more ruthless than other people”). Rudloff responded by leaving Credit Suisse and reinventing himself as an emerging markets banker, setting out to bring the benefits of capital markets to the newly freed countries beyond the Berlin Wall at a time when few investment banks dared to go there.
It was an adventure that catapulted him into the cockpit of Russian business in the era of Vladimir Putin, sitting on the board of the oil company Rosneft right until the outbreak of the Ukraine war. Rudloff continued to believe that in financing the reconstruction of eastern Europe, investment banking had “proved its worth, just as it did in 19th-century America”. But by the end of his life, he was dismayed to see the liberal, open world in which he believed was strongly in retreat.
Rudloff was born in wartime Cologne in 1940 to a German industrialist father and a Swiss mother. His dual nationality made him an outsider in the conservative world of Swiss finance, and perhaps impelled him to look beyond its borders. Small, bustling and intense, he always competed to the utmost. Unable to ski until later in life, Rudloff set out to rectify the situation, engaging a “crazy but enormously talented ski coach”, according to friend Bob Loverd, and systematically acquiring the skills of a pro. “If he decided to do something, he put everything he had into it,” Loverd recalled.
Rudloff could be polarising: his manner was often abrupt — even if the barbs were delivered with a twinkle. But to those he gave his friendship he was enormously loyal, and liked nothing more than to help those in whom he saw flashes of his younger self. “While he pushed you hard, he could be very kind,” said Charles Harman, a colleague at CSFB. “He would come round the floor at 8.30 in the evening and say: ‘Who wants dinner?’ to the juniors who were there. How many City bosses do that?” Rudloff’s last wish was to throw a party for his many friends.