Morning Coffee: Credit Suisse, UBS, Barclays all hiring bankers aged 47+. Words you must not say in banking

If you work in an investment bank, you might be of the opinion that your career will be over at 40, or 45, or 50. If you work in M&A, events this week have proven you wrong.

European banks on Wall Street are busy hiring the most senior M&A bankers in the market.  UBS just hired Joseph Hershberger from Credit Suisse as a vice chairman in its financial institutions group (FIG), focused on asset management. Hershberger is 53 years-old. Credit Suisse just hired Jeffrey Cohen from Lazard as a vice chairman in global and retail products banking. Cohen is 52. And, Barclays just hired two top healthcare bankers, Jason Haas and David Levin, from Deutsche Bank.  Haas is aged 47. Levin's aged is indeterminate, although Reuters notes that he has over 20 years' experience in M&A. 

What makes senior bankers so sought-after? Maybe it's because European banks are building their U.S. M&A businesses as a bulwark against declining revenues elsewhere, and because hiring senior rainmakers is the quickest way to achieve this? Needless to say, there's no guarantee of success. Just ask Nomura, which has been hiring senior M&A bankers on Wall Street for years, and is now pruning U.S. headcount back again. 

Separately, the list of words that may not be uttered in investment banks is growing. Barclays forbade all reference to PIIGS in 2010 and now Bank of America has forbade all reference to Brexit. The Financial Times reports that BofA has warned staff against uttering the banned for word for fear that doing so could be construed as taking sides in the debate. The U.S. bank has also reportedly shelved plans to donate £100k to the campaign for Britain to stay in the EU.

Meanwhile:

And the winners from Brexit will be.... the lawyers. (Bloomberg) 

New York-based brokerage firm Seaport Holdings just hired 51 year-old Scott Lynch from Credit Suisse as head of its institutional equity trading operations. It wants to hire another 10 to 12 people. (Bloomberg) 

Google's CEO earned $100m last year. (Business Insider) 

Richard Boath, a senior Barclays banker who sued the bank in a dispute over pay, is no longer with the bank. (Reuters) 

“We see certain kinds of women who are shopping with their husband’s money, and I believe that they are, in a way, an extension of their husband’s work.” (Financial Times) 

There are huge profits to be made in residential real estate and tiny profits to be made in securities trading. This is mostly because securities traders are so well paid. (Alphaville) 

Bobby Jain is joining Millennium Management. (MoneyistheWay)

"I can tell you what it was like at early Facebook: the food was terrible; we’d ship in lunch and probably two to three times a week the lunch had maggots in it. But we were there because we believed, and it didn’t matter." (Vanity Fair) 

A mathematical solution for stacking oranges in 24 dimensions. (New Scientist) 

Consuming up to 5 cups of coffee a day is fine. (NY Mag) 

Photo credit: Silver Fox Marino by napudollworld is licensed under CC BY 2.0.