Aramco IPO: The Wall Street Bankers Who Burst $2 Trillion Bubble - Bloomberg

Aramco IPO: The Wall Street Bankers Who Burst $2 Trillion Bubble - Bloomberg:

The chairman of the world’s biggest oil company was about to lose his temper.

At a meeting in Riyadh on a sultry October evening, Achintya Mangla, one of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s most senior bankers, had told Yasir Al-Rumayyan there was no way international investors were going to value Saudi Aramco -- just weeks away from an initial public offering -- at $2 trillion.

Al-Rumayyan, who’d risen in just a few years from head of a mid-sized investment bank in Riyadh to one of the most powerful jobs in the global economy, erupted. He unleashed a torrent of expletives in Arabic and English that shocked the roomful of battle-hardened bankers. The chairman was probably worried about telling his boss, the crown prince who locked up many of the nation’s wealthiest people in a five-star hotel just two years ago.

In the three and a half years since Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman first proposed an initial public offering of Aramco, the state oil company that pumps 10% of the world’s oil, the $2 trillion valuation had caused trouble.