Remember Erin Callan? The trim, blonde, ex-CFO of Lehman Brothers who – together with Zoe Cruz at Morgan Stanley, was once one of the most powerful women on Wall Street?
In 2007, aged 41, Erin Callan looked like this:
Nine years later, aged 49, and with no links to Wall Street she looks like this:
Callan isn’t the first ex-finance professional to undergo a remarkable physical metamorphosis upon leaving a finance job. Former Dresdner analyst Geraint Anderson now looks something like this:
Whereas, while he worked in the City, he looked like this:
In the case of Anderson, the transmogrification might have something to do with ageing and being liberated from the need to wear a suit, but Callan – who’s just self-published a memoir, thinks her change is more fundamental than that. Nowadays, Callan declares herself happy and fulfilled and infused with the joys of motherhood. During her days at Lehman, Callan wasn’t very happy at all. ““I confused success with passion,” she writes. “I was a woman not only looking to take a leadership role in a male-dominated industry, but doing anything to make that happen.” She was all about achievement: “I was willfully distracted as I kept moving up the ladder from job to job, focused on the next rung. I was never forced to evaluate exactly where I was because I didn’t pause to catch my breath to even consider it.” She was lurking around, “the dirty underbelly of career narcissism.”
Callan might feel differently about her finance career had it not ended so cataclysmically in Lehman Brothers’ collapse. Callan didn’t get a redundancy package, nor did she walk away with stock of much value. She did, however, get a belated late night apology from Dick Fuld who reportedly called out of the blue to he was sorry for making Callan take the crucial Lehman investor call unaided and that the bank’s demise wasn’t her fault: “He said everything I had wanted to hear for so many years.” Callan had closure – maybe that’s what’s needed to thrive outside banking?
Separately, the Financial Times has been doing some digging following last week’s Morgan Stanley report suggesting that buy-side firms will be hiring fixed income traders. It seems they will, and they won’t. The FT found that Deutsche Asset Management, Nordea Asset Management, Amundi, Pioneer and Jupiter have already increased the size of their fixed income trading desks – but usually only by two to five people each. However, it also found that Axa Investment Managers has cut its trading team by one person, to 24. There’s still not space for many of the traders leaving investment banks then.
Meanwhile:
Goldman Sachs is looking to close its Geneva private banking branch. (Reuters)
J.P. Morgan hedge fund salesman is joining Credit Suisse. (AFR)
Pankil Patel, an electronic trading executive at Credit Suisse Group AG, has left the firm. (Bloomberg)
Boutique firm Robey Warshaw hired Kunal Ranpara, a former VP on J.P. Morgan’s consumer sector team who worked alongside Robey on a deal. (Financial News)
The boutique run by Michael Klein, ex-Citi investment banking boss, has won a role on the Markit deal. (Financial News)
“As a top-ranked biotech analyst at Lehman Brothers, I had first-hand experience of working for people who viewed negative research as a reflection of, at best, jaundiced quirkiness and, at worst, mental instability.” (Financial Times)
French bankers love London: “A lot of us love living in the UK and do not really think about going home. I’ve yet to meet someone who says ‘Oh great, my job is going to be shipped back to Paris’.” (Financial Times)
MIT has got a new Big Data course. (Financial Times)
Ex-Bank of America and Barclays HR analyst is now homeless in Poole. (BBC)
Father in business or finance= a son in sales or the military. (Facebook)
There is nothing necessarily wrong with a life subsumed by work. (1843 Magazine)
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