7:00 Wake up and shower
7:15 Read Book of Mormon and Bible
8:20 Get dropped off at the people mover (free metro rail in downtown miami, kinda like those shuttles at disney world that are perched up about 10 feet above the ground)
8:50 Arrive at work and check my email
9:00 Notice that Citi's post-market stock price is at a ridiculously low 3.95 and make the decision not to watch it the rest of the day for fear of crying in front of my co-workers
9:03 Continue working on the "Country Decks" that we are making for conference calls that we have set up with the following district managers: Peru, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Brazil, Caribbean, Central America, Ecuador, Venezuela
The country decks are basically presentations that we are preparing for our boss Carlos, who is the manager of all of the Cash Management department in Latin America. Cash Management consists of all of the solutions Citi offers to a companies treasury department that involves the inflows (Receivables), outflows (Payments), and reserves (liquidiy and investments) of cash.
So these "decks" include the following about the cash department in each of these countries:
Income Statement
Monthly Receivables Report
Monthly Payments Report
Intitiatives (Goals) for the upcoming year-strategies to increase revenue / decrease costs
New deals that were won / lost / in the making with existing or future clients
9:45 Leo (my supervisor who is on Carlos' team with me) calls me and asks me to let Jose continue working on the Decks and start working on a web site that we are preparing for Banco de Chile
The website that I am preparing for BdC is a word document, prepared in english, that contains the different cash management solutions Citi offers in Chile. I basically go to Citi's Global Transaction Services website, copy and paste different descriptions of these products, find slipsheets and case studies to go along with these descriptions, and pass all of this along to the Chile manager so she can do a review of the details and then send it off to be translated.
10:45 Finish BdC website and resume working on the Country Decks.
12:30 Leo calls me and asks me to analyze the Time Deposits of the companies we have in Jamaica from one database and compare them to the same data we have in our database. The reason being the Jamaica manager claims that we are not accounting for all of their Time Deposits in our weekly report
Time Deposits are a fancy way of saying Certificates of Deposits (it took me about 2 weeks to finally figure this piece of information out)
Turns out that the numbers don't add up and one database contains more TDs than the other
12:45 I call Renatto, the go-to-guy for the NY databse and fill him in on the situation
1:00 Renatto sends about 13 different emails to a number of people in NY trying to get the above situation resolved while simulatenously flooding my inbox and ruining our friendship
1:15 Eat lunch
2:10 Sneak another peak at Citi stock. . . 2.90. I have managed to lose about half the money I had gained after a month long bull market
3:00 Receive an email from Martin Guelman, one of the managers in Argentina, sending me some updated addresses for different Argentinian companies, all of which I asked for about a month ago.
4:00 Finish the Country Decks and begin working on the Weekly Liability Presenation
The Weekly Liability Presentation includes the previous two week's International Payment Account balances (Direct Deposit Account, Overnight Sweep Account, Time Deposit) of all of the companies in the Latin American region, as well as the local balances of these countries (IPA is an account held in US$ in NY, whereas local is basically the savings and investment accounts within each respective country)
6:00 Carlos comes in right before we leave to fill us in on his concern with one of the companies and tells us that tomorrow we will need to do an in depth analysis on why this company has been doing so poorly compared to the other companies in that country
Monday, April 20, 2009
Carrie Prejean is my hero
So before I get into my travelogue that I made of my day at work, I just wanted to make a quick comment about my opinion on what Carrie Prejean (Miss California) said yeserday during the Miss America Pageant.
Prejean was asked by one of the judges if she thought that gay marriage should be legalized in all 50 states. Miss California then responded politely that in no way did she mean to offend anybody, but that she felt that a marriage was between a man and a woman. Now it turns out that the judge who had asked her this question happened to be a gay man, and decided to vote against the contestant. Unfortunately for Ms. Pajean, she came in second place as a result of it. And not only that, after the show that same judge who asked her the question went on air in a curiously-brazen outburst and exclaimed, "She did not win the pageant because of what she said, but because she is a dumb (female dog)."
I think both sides of the argument can respect the courage shown by this girl. She could have easily answered the question differently, thus appeasing the judges and consequently won the pageant. But instead, she stood firm in her conviction and told the world her true beliefs on the subject, despite the inevitable impact that it had on the results. It is unfortunate that politics has to get involved in these sort of events, and hopefully the world can see the negative influence taking place and do something to correct it.
Prejean was asked by one of the judges if she thought that gay marriage should be legalized in all 50 states. Miss California then responded politely that in no way did she mean to offend anybody, but that she felt that a marriage was between a man and a woman. Now it turns out that the judge who had asked her this question happened to be a gay man, and decided to vote against the contestant. Unfortunately for Ms. Pajean, she came in second place as a result of it. And not only that, after the show that same judge who asked her the question went on air in a curiously-brazen outburst and exclaimed, "She did not win the pageant because of what she said, but because she is a dumb (female dog)."
I think both sides of the argument can respect the courage shown by this girl. She could have easily answered the question differently, thus appeasing the judges and consequently won the pageant. But instead, she stood firm in her conviction and told the world her true beliefs on the subject, despite the inevitable impact that it had on the results. It is unfortunate that politics has to get involved in these sort of events, and hopefully the world can see the negative influence taking place and do something to correct it.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
April Fooooooooo (BOOM!) - Bart Simpson
So today I was going to play a joke on my supervisor, Carlos, by sending him our usual daily tracking report of the current investments we are managing, except this time I was going to subtract around $500 million from our current balance. I figured that his response could range anywhere between praising me for the good joke to firing me on the spot with a couple of spanish curse works mixed in. So I elected not to do the joke afterall.
Work today was pretty slow; in the morning I was able to prepare a couple of spreadsheets monitoring all of the Latin American Time Deposit accounts, but once that was over I ran out of things to do. So I spent a lot of the day reading up on current events. The topic that I spent most of my time investigating was the new bill that is trying to be passed that will allow congress to decide how much salary is paid to employees of any company that has received more than $5 bil. of TARP money.
When I first learned of this bill I experienced the following thought process, "Hey, this might be a good idea. Now the big shots on wall street can't pocket anymore of the taxpayer's money." But after I thought more about it, the idea of transferring more market power over to the government started to scare me.
When I was a kid, I used to think that as long as the government was in charge, the people's best interest would always prevail: The government is run by the brightest and most upstanding citizens in the country. Now that I am older and wiser then I was back then, I remember that this is not the case.
Work today was pretty slow; in the morning I was able to prepare a couple of spreadsheets monitoring all of the Latin American Time Deposit accounts, but once that was over I ran out of things to do. So I spent a lot of the day reading up on current events. The topic that I spent most of my time investigating was the new bill that is trying to be passed that will allow congress to decide how much salary is paid to employees of any company that has received more than $5 bil. of TARP money.
When I first learned of this bill I experienced the following thought process, "Hey, this might be a good idea. Now the big shots on wall street can't pocket anymore of the taxpayer's money." But after I thought more about it, the idea of transferring more market power over to the government started to scare me.
When I was a kid, I used to think that as long as the government was in charge, the people's best interest would always prevail: The government is run by the brightest and most upstanding citizens in the country. Now that I am older and wiser then I was back then, I remember that this is not the case.
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