Morning Coffee: Happy news on banker hiring for next year. The Citi trader who was bad, but not bad enough

If you’re in the office this morning, you’re probably in the mood for some cheerful news. And the phrase that brings a song to the heart of any investment banker is “hiring spree”. As the big financial services headhunting firms do their end-of-year temperature checks, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that some of the big banks are getting ready to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to the predictions of a private-equity-fueled deals boom in 2025.

John Weinberg, CEO of Evercore, for example, is “speaking with and recruiting… nearly every day”, even in November and December when hardly any activity usually happens. Some specialist recruiters estimate that their workload is as much as 70% higher than at a normal year end. This sort of comment has to be interpreted carefully – we don’t know how much of this represents the unusual seasonal pattern we saw in 2024, or whether hiring is being pulled forward from next year – but the pattern seems quite consistent across firms.

It's consistent across geographies too. JPMorgan’s EMEA CEO and global banking co-head Filipo Gori says that he has “a long list of people that we want to hire”. Even firms like Jefferies and Deutsche, which have spent the last two years picking up people as the bulge bracket right-sized, are talking about becoming more “surgical” rather than slowing down hiring altogether. About the only firm that is happy to be quoted as pausing for breath is UBS, and this is mainly because they are still digesting the Credit Suisse acquisition, which grew some teams by a factor of more than 50%.

Most of the people quoted seem to be focused on hiring rainmakers – the market is “putting a premium on bankers with strong relationships and sector expertise”. But every MD level move tends to generate a few follow-on hires at lower ranks. And every hire creates a vacancy, so it might be a good year to be an ambitious and high-performing Director at a bank which ends up as the target of someone else’s expansion program.

Elsewhere, the latest development in the interminable fallout from Citigroup Asia’s 2019 “indications of interest” scandal sheds some interesting light on the subtle differences between the kinds of ways that bankers can be separated from their jobs. A Hong Kong tribunal has said that Citi had “a valid reason to dismiss” Cindy Liu for misrepresenting the nature of a trading portfolio to a client. But it ruled that “summary dismissal” (in which the employee forfeits deferred compensation and pension benefits) requires a higher standard of evidence, and that Citi hadn’t presented enough evidence of “fraud and dishonesty”, as opposed to negligence.

It might be thought that this is a distinction that doesn’t make much of a difference, apart from the value of the pension and a few months’ notice pay.  If you’re fired, you’re fired.  But, of course, there’s a great deal of significance when someone starts looking for another job.  Any prospective employer is going to ask why you left the last place, and it’s important to have a good answer ready.

Best of all is to have been let go as part of a general business restructuring which can’t possibly be blamed on you. Being cut during an annual performance-related cull is harder to spin, but you can usually reframe it as a matter of “face didn’t fit” or “victim of stack ranking”. Being specifically fired, yourself, out of cycle, is bad news. And being “summarily dismissed”, with its implication of dishonesty, is worst of all – the tribunal’s deputy presiding officer Grace Chan called it the employment equivalent of “capital punishment”.

In fact, Cindy Liu is still employed in the securities industry, but it apparently took a long time, and she might not have ended up at a firm as prestigious as she’d have liked. The court heard her cases for damages on this score, but refused to grant them, only awarding her the specific financial difference between summary dismissal and an ordinary firing.  As always, it’s extremely rare for anyone to walk away from an employment court feeling like a winner.

Meanwhile…

One of the people on JPMorgan’s “long list” might have been Satoshi Shimada – he’s joined from Bank of America to lead their M&A business in Japan. (Bloomberg)

“He seemed to think it was very funny, bur it wasn’t”. Some version of this sentence has been the epitaph of many a banking career. Now employees and former employees of Terra Firma’s Guy Hands have been speaking up in this (seemingly carefully lawyered) profile of the former private equity star, who could have been the British Steve Schwarzman, but wasn’t. (FT)

Historically, “general partner at a venture capital fund” was an apex job, which you tended to stay in forever. But now, the VC funds are either growing (meaning that it’s no longer possible to shift the dial with unique or quirky investments and partners who don’t fit the institutional mould are leaving) or not growing (meaning that the new fund they’ve raised isn’t as big as the old one, so the economics support getting rid of a few investors). And so we’re seeing the launch of a load of boutiques in the sector. (Bloomberg)

If you’ve just walked into the office and been given a Christmas present by someone you weren’t expecting and haven’t bought anything for, don’t panic. The bookshops will still be open at lunchtime, staff there are surprisingly unjudgemental, and here’s a list of surefire recommendations for banking and markets people. (Business Insider)

Are you part of the “woke cartel”? Or to give it the official name, the “Net Zero Asset Managers initiative”. The House Judiciary Committee has got a bee in its bonnet about this particular ESG branding, and sent letters of investigation. (NY Post)

Whisky barrels and crypto are pretty mainstream asset classes these days, but what about unpaid Californian property tax bills? Here are a few ideas if you’re planning a niche career in the New Year. (Barron’s)

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