Nigeria's Banks Felt the Financial-Crisis Shock Waves
“We were buying stocks alphabetically”
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Oct. 17, 2008: A drop in oil prices forces major cutbacks in Nigeria
Days after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, Nigerian banker Mohammed Garuba gathered his business partners in an office in Lagos to figure out how to save their new investment banking firm, CardinalStone Partners. “We were confused, we were scared,” he recalls. “We were supposed to make a lot of money from corporate finance and trading, but clients were not executing trades anymore. All of that income vanished.” He and his partners decided to throw out the corporate finance and trading divisions to focus solely on asset management. “It wasn’t even about making profits,” he adds. “We were just thinking of how to survive.”