Investors may have been terrorized by housing busts, credit market meltdowns and tumbling stock prices but for the quote-smiths of the week it was more about food, creatures and greenery - about cream cakes, gruel, mammoths, snakes, owls and potted plants. And we were even told that Rupert isn’t a moron.
 

“We’ve put an enticing cream cake on the table for ABN shareholders, we are not going to top it up with cream.” — John Varley, Barclays CEO, on its revised bid for ABN Amro (July 23).
 
“Set against banking consolidation worldwide and the globalization of services, the policy is an anachronism, a woolly mammoth dug from the Siberian tundra and shipped still frozen to Australia as a structure for banking.” — Westpac Banking Corp. CEO David Morgan on rules preventing mergers among Australia’s four biggest banks (July 26).
 
“The snake does digest the rat. But it has a period of indigestion in the middle, and that’s where you’re at right now.” — Lawrence Schloss, CEO of private equity firm Diamond Castle Holdings LLC, in comparing the current state of financing for leveraged buyouts to a snake digesting a rat (July 27).
 
“He will not have naked bodies in the WSJ — he is not a moron.” — Crawford Hill, a member of the Bancroft family who supports the sale of Dow Jones to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., on a way in which Murdoch won’t change the Wall Street Journal (July 27).
 
 ”In some cases we felt that we were potted plants.” — Keith Johnson, president of Clayton Holdings, Inc., a Connecticut-based due-diligence firm, on how sometimes little attention was paid to its warnings about declining quality in subprime mortgage assets. (July 27)
 
“It used to be a one-way street, Nasdaq to NYSE, but what we have now is a back-and-forth slugfest.” — Patrick Healy, whose company Issuer Advisory Group, advises companies on where to list. (July 23) 
 
“This is yet another case involving a husband and wife. There have been a dozen over the last year or two.” — John Stark, chief of the SEC’s Office of Internet Enforcement, after the SEC charged a former employee of MDS Inc. and his wife with insider trading. (July 24) 
 
“The tide appears to be going out for levered equity financiers and in for the passive owl money managers of the debt market.” — Bill Gross, manager of the world’s largest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co.  He said money managers had snatched up bonds and loans for leveraged buyouts “as if they were prisoners in an isolation ward looking forward to their daily gruel passed unemotionally three times a day through the cellblock window. ‘Here, take this’ their investment banker jailers seemed to say, ‘and be glad that you’ve got at least something to eat!’” (July 26)
 
“I think it could get bloody.” — John Carter, a Wall Street recruiter at New York’s Hagan-Ricci Group Inc., in commenting on growing demand for credit risk specialists and a likely drop in demand for traders of structured credit products. (July 27)