Morning Coffee: CEO's message to bankers who want to stay employed. Optimism arrives too late for bonuses, again

If you're thinking about your long term employability in banking, you might've been thinking about getting into coding, or data analytics, or blockchain. Brian Moynihan, the rugby-loving CEO of Bank of America, has a message to you: you simply need a powerful data processor in the form of your brain.

Speaking of his own career success at Davos, and of the likely ingredients of career success in the future, Moynihan opined that it's all down to brainpower: "The ability of people to be successful in the future job market is going to come down to the ability to absorb tremendous amounts of information," he declared. Having absorbed all this information, you'll then need "to be able to process it and think through it and intellectually assess it." Moynihan credited himself with these traits, saying that his voracious reading and information absorption help him "every day."

In Moynihan's vision, the most successful people will be more than just giant processors, though. They will also have charisma.  "The smartest answer doesn't do you any good unless you get your teammates to actually do it or you get your customers to respond to it," he said.

Separately, things are looking up on trading floors. Credit Suisse CEO Tidjane Thiam (also at Davos), said yesterday that trading conditions have improved so far in 2018. "Since the beginning of the year we had a rare combination of markets and volatility going up," he observed, with the caveat that, "you cannot draw many conclusions from twenty trading days.” Traders would do well not to get too excited: the optimism comes too late to feed into bonuses. Something similar also happened last year, and look what happened after that.

Meanwhile:

In 2015 there were 470,500 fewer women earning more than £100k a year than men, up from 383,400 in 2010. In terms of the total numbers, 625,600 men across the UK earned more than £100k compared to just 155,100 women in 2015. (Financial Times)  

Cumberland Mining, a division of prop trading firm DRW holdings, is hiring Bitcoin traders. (Financial News) 

Axel Weber, chairman of UBS, said the Swiss bank won’t trade Bitcoin or offer it to retail clients as increased regulation could lead to a “massive” drop in value. (Bloomberg)

RBS is saving money by vacating its main London office. It will move to a more modest office nearby. (Financial News) 

Point72 hired former Credit Suisse trader Jonathan Conway as a portfolio manager. (Financial News) 

Lloyd Blankfein says Goldman Sachs is a sweet spot (trading businesses aside) and that it's partly thanks to Trump: "I think he's gone out of his way to be very, very supportive of the system." (CNBC) 

Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates has made gains of nearly $50bn since its inception. (Institutional Investor) 

Citadel and Citadel Securities are running a student competition with a $100k prize and the offer of an interview. (Business Insider) 

The wealthier your family, the more likely you are to invent something. (The Conversation) 

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