Five freaky recent hires at Deutsche, Goldman Sachs, Barclays and UBS

Hiring freezes are erupting in investment banks. However, hires executed earlier in the year are still coming through the pipeline. Here's the pick of interesting/curious hires to banks in London over the past month according to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Register.

1. Stuart Kirk, former editor of the Financial Times' Lex Column has joined Deutsche Bank as 'head of global research product'

In financial journalism terms, writing for the Lex column of the Financial Times is something of a holy grail, but that doesn't seem to have stopped Stuart Kirk, global editor of the column from throwing it all in for a job in a bank.

Kirk left the FT in September and has reportedly just rejoined DB, where his remit will be to look at major themes that may be of interest to clients, as well as possibly to the strategy of the bank itself.

In fact, Kirk has simply gone full circle, having joined the FT from Deutsche's asset management division in 2004. He's not the only journalist to join a bank recently: it was announced that Stephanie Flanders was moving from the BBC to JPMorgan in October.

2. Tobias Kleinschmidt, a particle physicist, has joined Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs has shown its partiality to particle physicists in the past. In May we reported that it had hired Ryan Buckingham, a particle physicist who'd worked on the Large Hadron Collider.  Now, Goldman has hired Dr. Tobias Kleinschmidt, who previously worked at the institute for particle physics at the University of Durham and has been conducting complex quantitative research.

This is Kleinschmidt's first job in London finance according to the FCA Register.

3. Stuart Dixon, a former infantry office in the British Army has joined Goldman's asset backed securities team

Dixon, a graduate of the University of Warwick and Warwick Business School, continues the trend for banks hiring ex-forces personnel. Dixon served in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2012 before joining Goldman's ABS team in London.

4. UBS has hired Peter Jones, a rates structurer from Roubini Global Economics 

There's nothing freaky about Jones per se, but it's notable that UBS has hired for its rates team despite supposedly pulling back from fixed income sales and trading. As we noted yesterday, UBS has also been hiring graduates for its fixed income sales and trading business. The bank told us this had always been its strategy and that, "rates and credit is an important division within our investment bank and has been doing extremely well this year."

5. Barclays has hired James Harris, a G10 FX spot trader from Merrill Lynch

Like Jones, Harris himself is not an unusual candidate. However, it's notable that Barclays has replenished its G10 FX spot desk. This was said to be short of six staff two weeks ago after the bank put traders investigated for FX price fixing on leave.

Harris left Merrill Lynch in August. Does this mean Barclays had prior warning of the regulatory fallout? Or was it just lucky in hiring for an area where it was about to send a lot of staff home?