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  • Who said recruiters can't read the market?

    We came across the article below, which was first published on this site in 2005. Back then, suggesting the boom in credit derivatives jobs might be a transitory phenomenon was rather like denying banks are in crisis today. But one lone recruiter (Noel Marshall of Finance Professionals) dared buck the trend. In retrospect, his comments seem eerily prescient... Rise and fall of credit derivatives: Guest comment Welcome to January, 2009. It's not... Read more

  • Lehman fixed income professionals left out in the cold

    Despite being staffed by some of the best in their business, it seems Lehman’s European fixed income units may be shunned by the bank’s buyers. At the moment, it looks like Nomura will soon be the new owner of Lehman’s European investment banking and equities units. Failing this, Barclays Capital is also said to be waiting in the wings, with a view to bolting on Lehman's equities arm. Lehman employs/employed around 5,000... Read more

  • TRANCHED: Life after CDOs, Week 14

    One year ago today the credit crunch entered popular vocabulary with the meltdown of two of Bear Stearns’ hedge funds. Twelve months on, newspapers remain full of speculation as to when it will come to a close. One article, in the Economist was written anonymously by a risk manager at a bank explaining the enormous failings that lead to the writedowns of the past 12 months. The tone of the... Read more

  • The great ratings agency cull

    In a move that’s likely to appeal equally to sado-masochists and anyone with an inkling that ratings agencies have something to do with the credit crunch, Moody’s has promised to ‘discipline’ its staff (The Times), and sacrificed its head of structured finance. Coding errors caused the crackdown (Financial Times), but there’s more to this than a transitory crack of the whip. As the structured credit market has plummeted, so has... Read more

  • Someone’s looking for 50 credit specialists

    Predictably, it’s not an investment bank. The company doing all the hiring is Markit, the information services provider. According to its head of HR, it is currently looking to hire 40-50 people in Europe, plus another 30 in the US and additional staff in Asia Pac between now and the end of the year. Markit is a rare example of a credit-focused business for which the credit crunch has been... Read more

  • Editor’s take: The jobs are out there

    What with thousands of redundancies and disappearing revenues, you could be forgiven for thinking that bankers who lose their jobs in the current environment won’t work again for a very long time. This isn’t strictly true. First (as ever), the bad news: Lehman Brothers is the latest to rejoin the redundancy parade, with a round of further job cuts, said to be imminent. But now, the good news: banks may... Read more

  • Week in Review: Swinging the axe at Bear, JP, Morgan Stanley, Calyon, Natixis and UBS

    There were lots more redundancies last week. Everyone from managing directors (Morgan Stanley) to associates (UBS) felt the steel. Bear Stearns continued to feel the pain of integration with JPMorgan. Reuters said JP has made job offers to only 6,000 of Bear’s 14,000 staff. Dealbreaker said they were being offered less than they got at Bear. JPMorgan was also said to be closing or spinning off most of Bear’s... Read more

  • Dr Dread: Nastiness is by no means over yet

    Ignore what banking bosses say: the nice decade is most definitely past and the nasty decade is upon us, says the purveyor of gloom…. Banking bosses are trumpeting the notion that the worst is over. But for a realistic perspective on the current state of play, the best person to listen to is Paul Volcker. The former chairman of the Federal Reserve, he who conquered inflation in the... Read more

  • Editor’s take: Toothless regulators won’t bite bonuses

    It’s down to regulators to reform the bonus system. And given regulators are powerless to intervene, reform looks as likely as a small village in Hampshire becoming the financial centre of the UK. Regulators are certainly making scary noises. From Mervyn King’s anti-bonus diatribe, to Sir Callum McCarthy’s call for banks to emphasise long-term performance, snarls and grunts about bonuses have been emanating from the regulatory corner for several months.... Read more

  • Week in review: Hooray for hedge funds, more cuts at investment banks

    It was a good week for hedge funds – unless you were GLG. Banks were still busily lopping staff, although there were rays of hiring in commodities and – strangely enough – leveraged finance. Hedge funds provided reasons to be cheerful. Hedge Fund Research predicted investors plan to pour $200bn into hedge funds this year. ICAP launched an African hedge fund. It emerged that the replica hedge funds... Read more

  • Pimco is the exception, not the rule

    Lost your job in an investment bank and want to work on the buyside? You’ll be lucky. The Financial Times ran an article yesterday which said that Pimco, the world’s biggest fixed income fund manager, has been approaching Wall Street banks that are making redundancies in the hope of hoovering up a few of their cast-offs. But before anyone gets the wrong idea, moving from an investment bank to the... Read more

  • Dr Dread: Bonuses are rotten, but necessary

    Mervyn King’s scathing attack on bonuses would be easy to dismiss as the naïve whining of an underpaid regulator, were it not for the stench coming from the system. The investment banking world, or the ‘Shadow Banking System’ – let's call it SBS, is a different world and a law unto itself. It exists in the real world (RW) and yet is distinct and apart – like oil on... Read more

  • Living dangerously: Diary of an ABS Professional, Week 21

    In which Mr ABS tries to help his wife come to terms with his new situation and comes into uncomfortably close contact with a Porsche 911. My novelty value is wearing thin. When I was first made redundant, my wife received reams of sympathy from the other school mothers, who tried very hard to reassure her that things would get better soon. Two of them even put me in touch with... Read more

  • Editor’s take: The mega-mortgage brigade should have seen it coming

    At the risk of being eviscerated and dunked in a vat of scalding Asti Spumante (now that Bollinger’s out of reach), it’s time to say the unthinkable: bankers who find themselves suddenly unable to service enormous mortgage payments have only themselves to blame. The Times last week produced an anecdotal portrait of a new phenomenon – the ‘poor banker’ with a £700k interest-only mortgage acquired in the go-go year of... Read more

  • Living dangerously: Diary of an ABS Professional, Week 20

    In which Mr ABS sees his friends being picked off one by one. Last week was cardboard boxes week. I had lunch with a friend who has been at Merrill for a few years. His morale was rather low as he had been told that there would be job cuts on his floor. At least he heard it from his management, not the press. Top management is often keen to leak... Read more

  • Dr Dread: All clear in credit derivatives?

    Forget platitudes from bank bosses and signs of life in the credit derivatives market, it’s all downhill from here, says our resident pessimist. After a deluge of favourable information in the past two weeks, an optimist might be inclined to think the worst of the credit crisis is over. The CEO of Lehman says the “worst is behind us”, and the CEO of Goldman Sachs declares, “We're closer to the... Read more

  • Living dangerously: Diary of an ABS Professional, Week 19

    In which Mr ABS lays his woes firmly at the door of the Government. Last week RBS announced it was letting 200 people go. Unlike other banks, it seems to have held on until the liquidity crisis got really bad before making serious redundancies. Citigroup and Lehman have had no such compunction – both have announced redundancies already and are sadly set to announce more in the weeks to come. Having been... Read more

  • Living dangerously: Diary of an ABS Professional, Week 18

    In which Mr ABS ponders what went wrong at UBS, and prepares to reinvent himself as a distressed debt specialist. UBS is a surprising casualty of the structured finance market. Whenever I used to speak to their clients I was told it was virtually impossible to secure a loan from the investment bank. Its structured finance team was minute. And yet, UBS has managed to pile up $38bn of losses. How... Read more

  • Living dangerously: Diary of an ABS professional, Week 17

    In which Mr ABS feels vaguely impelled to go and work for the FSA. The FSA was big news last week. It was rather shocking to see that the head of its retail division, who was also in charge of Northern Rock’s supervision, was rumoured to have left on a £300k-£400k severance package. This seems to stem from the school of thought that says you’re in trouble if you default on... Read more

  • Salary survey: Asia on top, equity derivatives trump credit

    The latest salary survey from search firm Napier Scott suggests Asian MDs now earn more than anyone else. And equity derivatives pay better than credit. Napier Scott’s 2008 salary and bonus survey suggests managing directors working on exotic credit trading desks at tier one banks in Asia commanded average total compensation of £1.5m (US$3.0m) for 2007. This was 45% more than their counterparts in the UK, and 117% more than the relatively... Read more

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