Morning Coffee: Top Morgan Stanley banker displays folly of the 'internal move.' John Cryan's odd comment

Aged 47 and with nearly three decades of banking experience behind him, you'd have thought Raj Dhanda might have known better. Instead, Bloomberg reports that Dhanda swapped out of capital markets (his comfort zone) and into wealth management (not his comfort zone). A mere 11 months later, he's leaving the bank in pursuit of "other opportunities."

Dhanda joined Morgan Stanley's capital markets business in 1989 and worked his way through the ranks to become its co-head in 2009. Why, in the circumstances, did he go off on a tangent and become 'head of investment products and services for wealth management'? Seemingly because James Gorman thought it would be a good idea. - Dhanda's move was all part of Gorman's attempt, "to give executives experience in multiple areas of the firm," says Bloomberg. Gorman was trying to, ' strengthen the bonds between Morgan Stanley’s bankers and traders, many of whom work out of New York and London, and the brokers who serve retail clients across the U.S.,' said the Wall Street Journal at the time.

Instead, Dhanda's leaving. Maybe he wanted to go - the implication is that he left voluntarily - but maybe he'd have stuck around if he hadn't made an internal move into an area completely unlike the one in which he'd developed a lifetime of expertise. You have been warned.

Separately, the Financial Times has detected something frankly bizarre in John Cryan's uplifting memo to Deutsche Bank staff. Cryan said he wants his Deutsche comrades to, "regain our leadership in the equities markets”, points out FT - even though Deutsche has never been a big player in equities and is naturally inclined towards FICC. Maybe he's getting Deutsche confused with UBS?

Meanwhile:

Moelis is hiring M&A bankers and restructuring professionals in London. (Financial News) 

Goldman Sachs has created a new internal group combining its automated trading activities. It's called Systematic Market Making and will be led by Konstantin Shakhnovich, who currently runs the bank’s Strategists groups across fixed income, currencies and commodities trading businesses.(Financial Times)

But who's actually in charge of financial stability in the eurozone? (Breaking Views)

A brief reminder why banks are based in London. (John Kay)

UBS is looking at the relative pay of men and women while it reviews compensation in the investment bank. (Reuters)

UBS has also frozen salaries for people who’ve been promoted. (BloombergView) 

The top and bottom performing hedge funds year to date. (Twitter) 

HSBC, Barclays and Bank of America Merrill Lynch were the banks that gave the most gifts and hospitality to senior civil servants over the three years to March 2015. (Financial News) 

Risk taking ‘global mindsets’ have gone out of fashion. (Bloomberg)

Collaborating is bad news when you're a female economist. (HBR) 

Photo credit: Sunset chess 2 by Vladimir Agafonkin is licensed under CC BY 2.0.