Archibald Cox, who started as chairman of Barclays Americas at the beginning of May, was not planning a return to the banking industry. After all, he had already headed up Morgan Stanley International in London and First Boston earlier in his career. More recently, he served as president and CEO of Magnequench, a manufacturer of rare earth magnetic material and magnets, formed his own private equity company, Sextant Group, and served on the board of several other public and private corporates. He is 67 years old and certainly did not need to work again.
“I wasn’t exactly planning on coming back to the financial world, having left in 1995, but I’ve known [president of the bank] Bob Diamond since the beginning of his career from when he started at Morgan Stanley. We’ve remained friends. We were chatting one day and I was asking his advice about something, one thing led to another, and here were are,” laughs Mr Cox.
