Brady Dougan was practically oozing with confidence last week. The chief executive of Credit Suisse Group announced that, despite posting a 72 percent drop in its fourth-quarter profit, the bank had navigated the credit crisis by scaling back on certain debt investments before they went south.
 
Analysts hailed Dougan's leadership skills. "Dougan is doing an excellent job, certainly better than his competitors here," Dieter Winet, a Zurich-based asset manager told Bloomberg. "Congratulations on your disclosure," Lehman Brothers analyst Jon Peace said on Credit Suisse's conference call. "I think it's truly the best in class and you've set the bar high for your peers to follow."
 
Today, Dougan finds himself right alongside his banking peers, uncomfortably below the bar. Credit Suisse announced that pricing errors by a group of traders had covered up $2.9 billion in losses on bond investments.

Dougan says he didn't know about the "mismarkings" when he announced earnings last week. Now, he may be the next Wall Street boss to find himself on the receiving end of a check from a sovereign fund that’s looking to bottom-fish the stock market, as Qatar sniffs around the bank’s shares.
 
Dougan is just the latest victim of the ongoing credit crisis, and his setback is just more evidence that no banking executive will emerge from this crisis smelling like roses. Indeed, there will only be varying degrees of stink.
 
Some analysts speculate that Richard Fuld, chief executive of Lehman Brothers, will be the next Wall Street leader to be knocked down from his perch on the idealistic cloud of confidence. The Wall Street Journal reports today that Lehman's $93 billion portfolio of debt securities is vulnerable to potentially significant losses. That worry has driven its stock down 2.5 percent in trading today.
 
During the fourth quarter, the fixed-income behemoth wrote down just $830 million, a paltry sum next to some of its competitors' multibillion-dollar losses. It helped to justify Fuld's controversial pay raise, which brought his 2007 compensation to an estimated $50 million. If the bank reports big write-downs during its next earnings announcement in March, investors will rightfully question whether that was incentive enough.

In fact, so jaded has the business media become that no news from the capital markets is good news. Barclays Capital, the investment-banking arm of the British bank, announced today that it had taken just a tiny amount of losses on its leveraged-loan holdings, even as that market in general has cratered in recent weeks. “We are very, very proud of it”, said Barclays Capital chief executive Bob Diamond.

But pride is a dangerous deadly sin, as Dougan well knows.
 
"Barcap Headache Not Over Yet," is the headline of Mike Verdin's take at Breakingviews. While the bank nimbly hedged its riskiest bets, it still has plenty of exposure. Today's announcement "doesn't mean that Barcap boss Bob Diamond can rest on his laurels," he writes.
 
Indeed, if Wall Street is a place where optimism is the new pessimism, it's safe to assume there are no laurels at all.