Morning Coffee: Death of third young banker in 12 months reignites long hours debate. London bankers can safely use WhatsApp again
The investment banking industry has, to say the least, a great uneasiness with the way that it treats the young people at its lowest ranks. Most of the time, theworkload is a matter for dark humour and a twisted kind of pride; everyone in banking has come through this kind of treatment themselves, and many of us have at least some fond memories of being young, bonding with our colleagues and learning the trade. But now and then, something awful happens, and bankers have a moment of introspection in which we worry; are we actually doing something very bad here?
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It's important to recognize at this point that there are almost no details in the public space about the death at home of Carter McIntosh, an associate in the Dallas technology media and telecoms (TMT) banking team at Jefferies last weekend. Rich Handler and Brian Friedman have sent condolences from the company, and the Dallas police have made a short statement describing the death as “unexplained”. And in an industry with tens of thousands of people working for it, some will die each year, simply as an actuarial fact. Everything else is speculation.
The speculation itself might be a kind of coping strategy. People gossip about extraordinary workloads on some teams. According to some anonymous sources writing in to Litquidity, the Dallas tech group was run by an ex-Moelis banker, where McIntosh had been an analyst too; the implication might be that some of the Moelis long-hours culture might have been brought across. But other sources suggested that Jefferies had actually done a lot to tame working conditions in Dallas, including firing some senior bankers who had been “crushing juniors”. It’s a natural
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