Should banks trust their traders to do the right thing in compromising situations? In theory, yes. But having learnt the hard way that traders – particularly in rates and FX, don’t always resist the temptation to make money by being bad, banks like Barclays are taking their traders seriously in hand.
Bloomberg reports that traders who were previously granted the freedom to see all sorts of information about clients’ trades and clients’ deals and were trusted not to act on the basis of that information, are having their special privileges removed. For example, at Barclays and RBS, traders were once able to see all their colleagues’ forthcoming deals and all their banks’ coming buy and sell orders in aggregate. Now, however, Barclays traders can only see ‘basic information’ regarding all deals above $20m, and RBS FX traders only get to see details of trades at the benchmark rate if they’re actually involved in them.
Barclays traders can always push their luck and try to access a deeper level of information on trading flows, but if they do Bloomberg says they will trigger the intervention of an automated playground monitor stating that, ‘their interest will be logged and an email sent to compliance.’
Separately, in celebration of the robust M&A pipeline and the general popularity of anyone who works anywhere near M&A, banks are suddenly hiring a lot of senior M&A bankers. Earlier this week we had UBS ‘plucking’ Ian Carnegie Brown from Credit Suisse, now we have JPMorgan hiring (also) from Credit Suisse, Bank of America poaching from Morgan Stanley, Evercore hiring a technology aerospace and defence banker, and Credit Suisse promoting someone internally to deal with all its South European banking clients. Senior M&A bankers can barely walk the street without being hit with job offers. Or so it seems. Sort of.
Meanwhile:
BlueBay is still hiring bankers! It just recruited the former head of emerging markets strategy at Citi. (Reuters)
By 2016, 20% of trading in the corporate bond market might be electronic. That’s not actually much. (Finextra)
Ex-Amaranth trader has to pay $750k to settle lawsuit. (DealBook)
These are the sorts of people from emerging market countries who go and work for Goldman Sachs (YourStory)
Modeloff: it’s happening again. (Modeloff)
Reasons to become an academic economist. (MarginalRevolution)
Sex and shoe bonuses for interns at UBS. (Dealbreaker)
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