Morning Coffee: Jamie Dimon’s real problem with working from home at JPMorgan. Boutique bank hands juniors a bonus, plus a top-up

Bankers have been on an emotional journey when it comes to the excuses given for not allowing them to work from home.  Back in the old days, it was simply a technical and legal impossibility.  Then the pandemic hit, and it became necessary, but they were warned that it could only be temporary – you needed the buzz and noise of the trading floor.  Trading profits actually improved, because it turned out that most of that buzz and noise was distracting and useless.  But of course, that only affected half the bank; nobody was really going to do an M&A or capital markets deal over Zoom.

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Then the 2022 deal boom happened, and top management decided that after consideration, the real reason everyone needed to be in the office was to help the younger staff learn their trade.  The younger bankers didn’t actually want this, so it turned out that actually people needed to have chance meetings in person to be more creative and come up with ideas.  When you say this out loud, it sounds a bit unconvincing, and so …

And so, as Jamie Dimon put it at a recent all-hands presentation discussing working from home at JPMorgan and a petition all for it. -  “Don’t waste time on it … I don’t care how many people sign that f—ing petition”.  He added that employees “have a choice whether to work at JP Morgan” and that “it’s a free country”.

In other words, because I say so.  It’s good to have reached the fundamentals at last. 

Dimon also suggested that some employees were malingering and not paying attention on Zoom calls, and that “I call a lot of people on Fridays, and there’s not a goddamn person you can get a hold of”.  But this sounds more like a bit of a grievance than a serious accusation at JPMorgan’s staff, because he also gave away something which sounds much more like the real root of his dissatisfaction and insistence that staff return to the office.

““I’ve had it with this stuff … I’ve been working seven days a goddamn week since COVID, and I come in, and—where is everybody else?”.  In other words, he’s lonely.  A lot of the top management of banks are very energetic and gregarious people, and they really take it personally when they have nobody to share their extroversion with.

Fair enough – although it might be an expensive decision.  Banks used to say that their most valuable assets left the building every evening.  At JPMorgan, that’s going to be true five days a week, on every single team.  (“There is no chance that I will leave it up to managers… Zero chance. The abuse that took place is extraordinary,” declared Dimon).  But if some of the best bankers decide that, having been shown the alternative, they don’t want to go back to the old-fashioned way of working, that could cost some very valuable human capital indeed.

Jamie Dimon thinks that the best bankers are the ones who agree with him and want to be in the office. Jane Fraser of Citi, and several others, disagree.  We’ll soon see who’s right.

Elsewhere, outside of banking, a “bonus” is usually thought of as something extra, a windfall that you weren’t expecting, but get given as a special reward.  It’s not, of course, it’s just the variable proportion of your normal compensation package.  Unless you work at Perella Weinberg and have a rank of executive director or lower.  In which case, you just got an extra $10k worth of restricted stock awards this year, just for being you.

It's a very well-calibrated amount – low enough to not really cost too much for a boutique bank, but big enough to be noticed by the recipients.  When it vests, they can buy a really nice suit or some drinkable wine.  And unexpected gifts like this have a disproportionate effect on morale. Lots of bankers really mean it when they say that the bonus season is more about recognition than money, and few Perella Weinberg bankers are likely to forget the time that the MDs and partners decided to give them a nice surprise.

Meanwhile …

JPMorgan people who return to the London office are finding there aren't any seats. (Telegraph) 

Barclays has made a similar move to Perella Weinberg, albeit at a smaller scale – 90,000 junior employees are getting about £500 of restricted stock each. (Bloomberg)

And Amazon is demonstrating that “everybody back in the office” is not as simple as it looks; lots of people are sitting at their desks having Zoom meetings. (WSJ)

Bankers of a certain age have a Pavlovian reaction to the phrase “Equities in Dallas”, as it was the punchline to a memorable passage in the book “Liar’s Poker”.  Forward this story about the NYSE moving its Chicago office to Texas to your local boomer and watch him say the phrase. (Business Insider)

Possibly the most relatable thing that a politician has done in years – UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been found, after an investigation, to have slightly exaggerated her LinkedIn profile. (Bloomberg)

Goldman Sachs has a new global head of internet investment banking – Jane Dunlevie continues to be COO and head of investment banking services for the TMT group, but Brandon Watkins is expanding his current fintech role. (Bloomberg)

Minotaur Capital, an Australian hedge fund that uses a large language model to generate stock reports from news stories and employs no analysts, is up 13.7% for the year so far and has beaten the market … (Bloomberg)

… however, Tadrus Capital, a hedge fund which claimed to use AI and employed no analysts, has been wound up as a Ponzi scheme and its principal has just pleaded guilty. (Investment Executive)

“Loneliness is a cybersecurity issue”, and romance scams are only going to get more epidemic as generative AI helps the fraudsters hone their techniques. (WIRED)

For managers who are concerned about personality and “fit” with an existing team, but not quite so concerned as to get to know a candidate themselves, there’s a choice between actual astrology, or customised personality tests which are presumably much better than astrology. (WSJ)

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