Lunchtime Links: Holiday fever boosts M&A

Confirmation that July was a pretty good month for M&A comes from Thomson Reuters, which showed that announced bids for UK companies came in at $26.6bn (16.7bn) - the third highest month since the boom times of 2007.

Investment bankers may therefore conclude that their stock is on the cusp of going up, assuming of course this represents a turnaround for the sector rather than a blip in activity.

The Times takes a rather sideways glance at the figures, suggesting that the flurry of activity may be down to bankers eager to tie up deals before embarking on their summer holidays.

"Deadlines are always useful in an M&A deal and people going away in August is a good reason for longstanding deals to get done," Anthony Parsons, UK head of mergers and acquisitions at Deutsche Bank told the newspaper.

It's also down to the fact that private equity has returned, and that many companies have taken the past two years to get into shape and are now ready to enter synergies to take advantage of this, he suggests.

"We'll have to wait until September or October to see if this is a sustained recovery," says Parsons.

Citigroup looks internally for investment banking re-build (Deal Journal)

JPMorgan to unveil key hire for emerging markets commercial banking push (Financial Times)

Deutsche's head of global markets to retire this year (Bloomberg)

Talent isn't leaving Wall Street, it's just moving to boutiques (Fortune)

JPMorgan's fairly expletive-filled reassurance to commodities team (Bloomberg)

Banker bashing benefits no one (Telegraph)

"Investment banking has been doing pretty badly in the last two to three months and my information is that bonuses are going to be hit pretty badly by that." (Telegraph)

RBC Capital is looking for a new credit trading head (Financial News)

BarCap recruits tech banker from Yahoo! (DealBook)

State Street expanding into active management (Bloomberg)

RBS has "left itself open to the risk that it was facilitating terrorist financing" (PA)

Wall Street's most eligible bachelors (NY Mag)