Morning Coffee: Ex-Goldman Sachs partner returns to Goldman after 1st break in 25 years. Morgan Stanley bankers pull off a fantastic save

When senior bankers take jobs in industry, they are often surprised to find out that it’s a lot easier to advise other people on deals than to bear the responsibility of making choices themselves.  So there’s always a lot of admiration for people like Nick Giovanni, who left Goldman Sachs’ technology team in 2021 to become CFO of Instacart, and who has now, after taking the company through a successful IPO, returned to the mothership.

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Interestingly, according to the post he made last year when resigning from Instacart, part of the reason that Giovanni wanted to return is that although he no longer has anything to prove when it comes to doing deals as a principal, advising on them is actually more fun.  He said that “advising founders, executives and boards is what I love to do.  I loved it as a banker, and I have loved it as a CFO”

Now Giovanni is loving it as a banker once again.  And he’s had enough time to arrive at the conclusion that what makes him happy is doing deals.  When he left Instacart, he changed his publicly displayed job title to “Taking Time Off”, and said that he was having his first significant period of leisure for 25 years and spending time with his family.  That lasted eight months, which is ample for beaches and golf, before apprehending that your true love is Goldman Sachs. Nor is Goldman the sort of jilted partner that bears a grudge when its people walk away. – It likes to keep in touch with “alumni” and offer them little investment perks. It probably helps, too, that as CFO of Instacart, Giovanni chose Goldman to advise on the grocery delivery firm's $9.9bn IPO.  

Giovanni's new job at Goldman may be better than his old one. Although he's returning to his old rank of Partner, he isn’t going back to his old job as head of the TMT group.  Instead, he seems to have had a special role created for him personally, which will involve being “100% focused on technology clients”.  This is the fun bit of talking to important and interesting people, and doing deals. Being a senior manager might pay more, but a look at the Instacart share price suggests that Nick Giovanni doesn’t need to worry about money; he can devote his retirement to the thing he loves, without even needing to retire.

Elsewhere, Morgan Stanley is apparently seeing a lot of demand for its sale of what used to be called “Twitter acquisition debt” and is now apparently called “a play on proximity to Donald Trump, with possible equity upside from xAI”.  If the well-sourced rumours are true and the deal is getting scaled up at a price of 95 cents in the dollar, it will truly be an epic save for what was looking like one of the worst deals of 2022.

That might mean some interesting conversations across the tech banking industry, because quite a lot of bankers had their bonuses cut to reflect mark-to-market losses on the deal. Particularly at Barclays, where the bank was very clear that it was this deal which should be blamed for a 40% cut in top M&A bankers’ compensation. Do they now get some of their money back?

Meanwhile …

The death of DEI might have been somewhat exaggerated; Sergio Ermotti points out that for UBS it’s a “cultural issue … part of the way we run the firm” rather than being dictated by political changes in any jurisdiction. (Financial News)

And the actual law hasn’t changed yet; new rules forthcoming from the Financial Conduct Authority are going to set strict standards with respect to harassment and bullying, and they will apparently have “teeth” (Financial News)

Mortgage-backed securities are one of the corners of the bond market where electronic trading has hardly reached.  And it’s a pretty big corner, with over a trillion dollars of securities issued in 2024. Everyone wants to reduce the opacity and fragmentation of pricing, but for the moment, it’s a market where human skill is still in demand.  (Tradeweb)

You wouldn’t necessarily expect a Managing Director at JPMorgan to express sympathy for Elizabeth Holmes, the young CEO who went to jail for the Theranos fraud.  Nor would you expect one to use “an expletive” while saying that investors in that company deserved what they got.  But when you find out that the MD in question was former young CEO Charlie Javice, who got that rank when JPM acquired her college finance site called “Frank”, and that she’s about to go on trial for allegedly inflating its user numbers, it somehow seems to make a bit more sense. (Bloomberg)

“Everyone and their mother” is begging to be included in the new Presidential cryptocurrency advisory council, according to one industry insider.  Although it’s doubtful that anyone’s mother is actually all that keen. (NY Post)

With two more shareholder showdowns out of the original seven left to go, Boaz Weinstein’s campaign against London investment trust managers is so far yet to see its first victory. (Morningstar)

As the saying goes, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good – the changes to non-domiciled tax in London have created a lot of profitable work for lawyers, restructuring the estates of those billionaires who don’t fancy Dubai. (FT)

While traders in New York and London have had a bit of a roller-coaster week, spare a thought for their colleagues in Hong Kong, who have had to watch the tariff circus from the sidelines during the lunar new year holiday.  Now they’re back to survey the damage. (Bloomberg)

What have hedge funds got in common with groupthink, the Paypal Mafia and trophy wives?  They were all phrases first coined (along with a surprising volume of other things we think of as everyday language) in Fortune magazine. (Fortune)

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