Morning Coffee: Deutsche Bank director who didn't attend strip club thriving in new job. £1.4m for 12-18 hour days in a hedge fund
In a reminder that Santander's senior DCM bankers aren't the only ones with a tendency to visit strip clubs, one of the bankers entangled in Deutsche's strip club affair of 2022, is back in the news.
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Confusingly, Brandon Sun, a former Deutsche Bank director and head of Spac advisory, was one of four bankers fired over the DB strip club slap down even though he didn't actually attend the club himself. Instead, Sun - who was at Deutsche Bank for 10 years - was reportedly involved in the subsequent expense report where the visit was passed off as a trip to an adjoining steak house. Unlike at Santander, where repercussions were minimal, all four DB bankers were let go without their deferred stock, Sun included.
A few bleak years followed. Although Sun was quickly re-hired as a managing director by Cohen & Company, the Spac [Special Purpose Acquisition Company] market collapsed. Puck News notes that there were 613 Spac deals in 2021, but only 31 in 2023 and 57 in 2024. For a Spac specialist paid on performance, pickings were thin.
In 2025, however, Spacs are back. The Financial Times notes that Spacs, which are blank check companies that list on public markets before merging with target companies, are having another moment. Trump is a Spac fan and the expectation is that the vehicles will be treated more leniently than standard IPOs by the new administration. Already this year, there have been 44 SPACs raising $9bn, compared to 57 raising $9.6bn for the whole of 2024.
After a period of purgatory, therefore, Brandon Sun is back in the sun. 2025 is turning out to be a "pretty incredible" opportunity for Spacs, Sun tells the FT. This was supposed to be the "year of the IPO" but "those hopes have been dashed and crushed." It's the year of the Spac instead.
In this new world of plenty, Cohen & Cohen is in joint first place with Cantor Fitzgerald for Spac IPOs in 2025. It's also a specialist in the "de-Spac" or reverse merger in which a private company is taken public by merging with a Spac. The sun is also shining again on Spac-man Michael Klein, whose hopes of making an enormous pile of money at Credit Suisse were dashed by UBS.
It's a happy reminder that even if you lose your job and all your stock over the demarcation between steak house and strip joint, times can change. Presumably, though, Sun won't be signing off any expenses for visiting Sapphire on the Upper East Side in future.
Separately, if you read our compensation report and thought that hedge fund jobs are a fine option for anyone looking for high pay and low hours, then Jacopo Moretti, the hedge fund analyst who fell out with his mentor and who is now in court, would like to set you straight.
Moretti says he worked 12-18 hour days for his £1.4m ($1.9m) a year at hedge fund Davide Leone & Partners and that he dedicated his life to his job. He also claims that he was forced to listen to the paranoid rantings of his boss. Davide Leone emphatically denies this and says Moretti's hours were not excessive. Maybe hedge fund jobs are not all that.
Meanwhile...
Ovie Faruq, the former high-yield cash and derivatives trader who left Barclays in late 2021 gave gifts of NFTs to former Barclays colleagues and retained his deferred remuneration after leaving. (Bloomberg)
World Quant's Tulchinsky suggests AI might displace data analysts. “The first thing that the LLM can do is it can structure data and 80% of data that’s out there is unstructured.” (Forbes)
JPMorgan alone made more profit last year than the top five eurozone banks put together. (Bloomberg)
Citi is cutting 200 Chinese IT contractor jobs as it brings technology roles in-house. (Reuters)
Economic consultants who provide expert testimony in antitrust litigation and regulatory investigations, including those arising from M&A transactions are part of a London bidding war involving FTI Consulting. (Financial Times)
Demanding that staff return to the office is a way of making cheap layoffs when people leave of their own accords. (Business Insider)
Transport for London data showed that “tap outs” at City workers’ main Tube stations — Bank, Liverpool Street and Moorgate — rose to 84% of pre-pandemic levels in the six months to March. (The Times)
UBS is in talks to compensate clients who bought FX derivatives whose value collapsed during the wild currency moves after Trump's tariffs were first imposed. (Reuters)
Jamie Dimon came to the UK and talked about JPMorgan's £3.3m contribution to a careers advisory service in England. Dimon has a twin brother, Ted, who is younger than him by 27 minutes. (The Times)
It's a terrible time to be a new graduate. The labour market is “freezing” as businesses simultaneously make fewer hires and fewer job cuts, making it harder for early-career workers to break into the labour force. (Bloomberg)
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