Today's job cuts at Barclays Capital mark the latest setback for Bob Diamond, the ambitious American-born executive who has increasingly been forced to defend his reputation since the onset of the credit crunch.
The smooth-speaking Mr Diamond, a former lecturer at the University of Connecticutt's School of Business, has long been seen as the biggest cheerleader for the corporate debt markets.
Since joining Barclays in 1996 as head of its fixed income division, at the time part of the Barclays de Zoete Wedd investment banking arm, Mr Diamond has been instrumental in the group.
Barely a year after his arrival, Barclays then chief executive, Martin Taylor, decided that the bank no longer had the stomach for investment banking.
A month later, in November 1997, and the bulk of BZW's equities and mergers and acquisitions departments were sold to CS First Boston for just $170 million. Only Mr Diamond's empire was left intact.
Mr Diamond - or more accurately Robert E Diamond Jr - did not waste his chance.
The Connecticut-born father of three, who has a passion for the American baseball team the Boston Red-Sox, swiftly renamed the division Barclays Capital and set about riding the boom in providing debt funding for companies across the globe.
While executives including Mr Taylor, Sir Peter Middleton and Matt Barrett came and went over the next six years, Mr Diamond quietly cemented his power base within the bank.
He took charge of the fund management arm, Barclays Global Investors, and began to control Barclays Wealth and its private client division.
Profits at BarCap grew. By the end of 2003, Mr Diamond's debt-fuelled workforce was generating a fifth of the entire group's £3.9 billion in annual returns.
But Mr Diamond, who has latterly become a fan of Chelsea Football Club and is on first-name terms with most of the team, made his most audacious move at the beginning of 2004.
In cahoots with John Varley, the chief executive whose job he had once coveted, Mr Diamond conceived the Alpha Plan, which aimed to double Barclays Capital's profits and hire about 3,000 bankers over the next four years.
Mr Diamond was elevated to bank president and given a three-year performance based incentive scheme that was eventually to earn him a £25 million bumper payout in salary and bonuses for 2007.
By then Barclays Capital had more than reached its target, generating £2.3 billion in pre-tax profits that year.
But the world had also changed. Barclays dropped a potentially transforming £36 billion plan to merge with ABN Amro, the Dutch bank which ironically had collected parts of BZW more than a decade earlier.
The debt markets went into seizure and Mr Diamond was forced to defend the bank amid speculation that it would be forced to write down billions in his division. Rumours abounded that the bank was being forced to seek emergency funds from the Bank of England.
Today's job cuts will hit all of Mr Diamond's divisions, although advocates would argue that the 7 per cent reduction in staff across investment banking and investment management is relatively modest.
But Mr Diamond may yet have another ace up his sleeve - the opportunistic acquisition late last year of the North American operations of Lehman Brothers, the collapsed Wall Street investment bank.
It remains to be seen how many former Lehman bankers will be handed their cards as part of the Barclays Capital jobs purge over the coming days. But with their help, there may be hope yet in the wreckage of the credit crunch.
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By:Bob Serrao on Eki 12, 2009
To: Mr. Bob Diamond, President My account with Juniper - 5140-2180-2379-8182. Mr. Diamond - I am trying to clear or pay this account off as early as possible. I've asked for help in maybe a lower interest or finance charges but have received no answer as yet. I am dealing with cancer and am afr
