Prologue

1 Macquarie recorded net profit for FY2021 of A$3.015 billion, up 10 per cent year on year. 

2 In truth the windfall wasn’t just from the storm; the performance of that business would likely have required a re-forecast anyway. ‘The reality, which was not well understood, was that we were getting to the point where we were going to beat our forecast and then that event took place,’ says O’Kane. ‘And then we re-forecast the entire CGM forecast for the rest of the year, and then for Macquarie Group. Everyone forgets that, to that point, the rest of the business had actually outperformed . . . people think the only thing that helped you outperform that year was the storm. That’s a bit unfortunate. But those are the disclosure rules.’ 

3 See page 12 https://www.macquarie.com/assets/macq/investor/results-and-presentations/2022/macquarie-group-fy22-presentation.pdf 

4 We don’t make this comparison idly. Macquarie’s the tree, Commodities and Global Markets is the arm, commodities the branch, US energy the twig, natural gas transmission the shoot. 

5 30 September 2022. Shareholders’ equity refers to the total that the owners of a company have invested in the business, including paid-in capital and retained earnings. This figure has grown dramatically—from A$24.1 billion on 30 September 2021—as a consequence of equity raisings through and after the Covid-19 pandemic, high levels of retained earnings, and foreign exchange benefits from the strong US dollar. 

6 At the time of writing its all-time high close was at A$215.73 on 5 January 2022. At the time that inferred a market cap of over A$80 billion.  

7 That’s Stan Owens as chairman of Hill Samuel Australia and then David Clarke and Mark Johnson as joint managing directors, followed by Tony Berg, Allan Moss, Nicholas Moore and Shemara Wikramanayake as CEOs. 

8 This term leads to a bracing discussion about apostrophes. Since the phrase first appeared in the Australian media, it is mostly used with an apostrophe after the S: this is commonplace in references in the Australian Financial Review, The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald, for example. However, it implies a factory owned by millionaires. 

There is an argument for ditching both the apostrophe and the S, implying a factory that makes millionaires: the millionaire factory, like a car factory. Early use of the term, such as in reports from the ABC in 2005 and Crikey in 2006, take this form. More time has been spent debating this than is healthy. See https://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2005/s1403805.htm and https://www.crikey.com.au/2006/08/21/is-the-macquarie-model-losing-its-lustre/. Stephen Mayne, Crikey’s founder, may have coined the term.