SocGen’s fixed income traders are something special. While fixed income traders at Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Credit Suisse and Nomura all saw revenues plummet year-on-year in the first quarter, SocGen’s traders saw revenues rise. Nor was theirs a paltry increase like the 2% achieved by Barclays’ fixed income traders in the first quarter – at SocGen, revenues rose by a healthy 17%.
The increase appears to have been due to rates and commodities, which SocGen said benefited from “stronger demand for hedging solutions” from clients. FX and credit were less strong by comparison.
What will SocGen’s fixed income traders get for their efforts? Seemingly, not much at all. Like most rivals, SocGen is complaining about additional compliance costs. In an effort to save money, SocGen is making redundancies, offshoring more jobs to Budapest and Bangalore, exiting mortgage-backed securities sales and trading in the U.S. and stopping being a primary dealer in the UK. In the circumstances, the French bank’s excellent traders are doing little more than mitigating the pain. Bigger bonuses are almost certainly out of the question.
Separately, the happy tale of Richard Campbell-Breedon shows how far Goldman Sachs will go to move you about internally when it likes you. The Financial Times reports that Campbell-Breedon just negotiated an internal transfer back from Goldman’s office in Hong Kong to its office in London for family reasons. Campbell-Breedon, a former star private equity banker in Europe who joined Goldman in 1989, moved to Hong Kong with the bank in 2008 to co-head its Asia ex-Japan M&A business. Fortuitously, this was just as Asian M&A took off. Now that things there are a bit quiet, Campbell-Breedon is back in London working on senior client coverage for EMEA – and keeping his family happy in the process.
Meanwhile:
There’s a new head of fixed income at Natixis. (Global Capital)
ECM bankers in Europe had an incredibly busy April in the window for capital raisings between the Easter holiday and the UK vote on EU membership, and are now idle. (Financial Times)
Distressed debt traders’ days are numbered at Credit Suisse. (WSJ)
Upset at Moelis as its biggest ever European deal is cancelled. (WSJ)
A senior coverage banker just left Barclays. (Reuters)
Investment bankers in very senior or very junior jobs are the most satisfied group. (Financial News)
“The glory days are over. Most senior professionals have seen their total compensation fall 50% to 60% from 2007 peak levels.” (Financial News)
Jailed LIBOR trader Tom Hayes is crowdfunding a new attempt to appeal against his conviction. (Business Insider)
Senior Barclays executive says the bank should have given its people more LIBOR training. (Reuters)
Lance Braunstein, former head of investment banking technology at Goldman Sachs, just joined Aperture – a fintech firm that hired 100 people in the past year. (WSJ)
You can program IBM’s quantum chip online here. (New Scientist)
The disposable income of private renters in inner London dropped by 28% between 2001 and 2011. (Economist)
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Photo credit: Société Générale by Damien Roué is licensed under CC BY 2.0.