Morning Coffee: Goldman Sachs' London banker and the $900m loss. CV exaggeration in the UK's top finance role

When 44-year-old Michael Bruun, the London-based co-head of global private equity at Goldman Sachs, invested in Swedish battery maker Northvolt in July 2022, he wrote on LinkedIn that he was "proud" to do so. 

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It wasn't the first time that Goldman's European private equity business, led by Bruun, put money into Northvolt. - Goldman led a funding round for the battery maker in 2019, after which Bruun was given a seat on Northvolt's board. Bruun and Northvolt's CEO Peter Carlsson got on sufficiently well for Bruun to do his own Goldman Sachs 'insights' interview with Carlsson. Goldman became Northvolt's second-biggest shareholder, with a 19% stake in the firm. The investment was supposed to make big money: the Financial Times says Goldman told its investors that Northvolt would be worth 4.29 times what Goldman paid for it, and predicted that this would rise to six times by next year. 

In fact, Goldman's Northvolt investment is worth nothing at all. The FT reported at the weekend that the firm has written it down to zero after Northvolt filed for bankruptcy. Carlsson has resigned as CEO. Bruun's Goldman Sachs insights interview has been quietly deleted from the internet. And the Goldman investors who thought they'd get rich from Northvolt have lost all their money.  

Those investors include Goldman's ex-partners and its current employees, who paid into the West Street Capital Partners funds that invested in the battery firm. As the dust settles, questions will be asked about the wisdom of that investment, particularly in the light of earlier FT articles stressing the ineptitude of Northvolt's management and the excess of money sloshing around. As testimony to its impressive spending, Northvolt has ended up with $5.8bn of debt and only $30m of available cash. 

In Bruun's defence, it might be pointed out that Northvolt is just one of Goldman's many private equity investments, and there will always be some duds. Coming this close to bonuses, though, a $900m writedown is unlikely to be popular internally, including with all the partners whose money is in the fund.

Separately, Rachel Reeves, the UK's first female chancellor, is having a few issues with her CV and LinkedIn profile.

Reeves, who has said she turned down a job at Goldman Sachs aged 21, wrote on her LinkedIn profile that she was an economist at Halifax bank, when in fact it seems that she was running a complaints team for the retail bank. She's also been known to say that she spent a decade at the Bank of England, when she was only there for six years. She also claimed to have been an economist at HBOS, but reportedly quietly changed this to 'retail banking' last week. 

Does this matter? Reeves claims don't detract from the fact that she was an economist at the Bank of England for six years and does have a master’s degree in economics from the LSE, which is more than some previous chancellors have had. Even so, it's not a good look, particularly as economists like Stephen King at HSBC question Reeves' strategy. King's own LinkedIn profile says he's been an economist for 30 years. 

Meanwhile...

Rachel Reeves wasn't popular in the HBOS complaints department. “She looked down at people. She just thought she was above everybody else.” (The Times) 

Scott Bessent, the veteran hedge fund manager who's the new Treasury secretary, wants tariffs, a shadow chair for the Federal Reserve and maybe a weaker dollar. (Bloomberg) 

Bessent and his allies executed a public-relations campaign aimed at getting him on the TV stations Trump watches. Just before Bessent was announced in the role, Trump's advisors asked Marc Rowan at Apollo if he wanted the job; he said he did. (WSJ) 

Bessent worked for Soros and played a key role in the firm’s bets against the British pound in the early 1990s and the Japanese yen in the early 2010s. (Forbes) 

Ex-Bank of America banker Omeed Malik is employing Donald Trump Junior. They often hang out. (NY Magazine) 

JPMorgan Asset Management has increased headcount across its European ETF business by more than 20% over the past year, in anticipation of growing demand for actively-managed products in the region. (Financial News) 

PwC is paying an extra £35k in employer’s NIC for each of its 1,030 partners. (The Times) 

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