Morning Coffee: Junior hedge fund analyst has serious issues with long term mentor. Jamie Dimon says young bankers will come to love the office

If you're a junior analyst from Italy with an interest in working for a hedge fund in London, then who better to ask for help than the son of your mother's best friend, who's already a portfolio manager himself? But what do you do when that relationship sours and your number one mentor and "protector" allegedly becomes "coercive, controlling and abusive" and makes you feel crazy?

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It all sounds very difficult. Instead of turning to their friendly Italian mothers to resolve their predicament, hedge fund founder Davide Leone and his former junior analyst Jacopo Moretti have ended up in a London court. Moretti says Leone was abusive and offensive and made him feel like he was going mad. Leone says Moretti lost $86m and that he feels utterly betrayed by his former friend, whom he treated like a family member. 

Moretti, who has many secret recordings of Leone venting, is suing for race discrimination and under whistleblowing rules (meaning an uncapped payout for wrongful dismissal if upheld). Leone, who implies it was just banter with an old friend, says he always paid Moretti fairly, until Moretti lost the $86m and then went on sick leave for a year, at which point he fired him. 

If there's a moral to the ongoing story, it's that you're actually best off not pinning your career to a single person, even if your mothers do get on very well back home. Sub-learnings might be that the closest friendships in the hedge fund industry are easily subverted by large losses. And that it's not only the well known erratic CIOs who like to have a shout. 

Separately, Jamie Dimon has had some more thoughts about the recent time he was secretly recorded saying things about "f*cking Zoom," and stating, "Don’t give me this s**t that work-from-home-Friday works."

“I emoted a little bit,” said Dimon in a display of self-knowledge. While he could have emoted less, Dimon stands by his passion for working in the office instead of working from home. Working from home "doesn't work for management" and "doesn't work for innovation" he told Bloomberg yesterday. 

People who think they don't like working in the office will come to see the error of their ways, said Dimon, in more measured tones. “I think our employees will be happier over time. And the younger people learn the right way; it is an apprenticeship system and you can’t learn working from your basement.”

Meanwhile...

AI can't entirely replace junior bankers or reduce work. "A system of long hours has some merit. It forces immersion, and those who skip it altogether may miss the muscle memory that only comes from living through the detail. Analysts who skip the drudgery may also miss the rhythms and reflexes it instils, however wasteful the process may seem..." (FT) 

HSBC is cutting 348 jobs in France through a voluntary redundancy scheme. (Reuters) 

40% of the recent 2,000 job cuts in Washington at Microsoft were software engineers. AI is writing up to 30% of the code on some projects. (Bloomberg) 

Wintermute opened a New York office and wants to grow its headcount there. (Financial News) 

Market making firms are interested in Saudi Arabia. (Bloomberg) 

Bank of America analyst Ahmed al-Doush has been sentenced to 10 years in a Saudi prison over an apparent tweet. (ABC) 

Bank of America named Jeff Tannenbaum as the new head of corporate and investment banking across Europe, the Middle East and Africa after Jim O'Neil joined the Treasury. Tannenbaum joined as an intern in 1998. (Bloomberg) 

EY Parthenon has told its incoming graduates and masters students that they won't be needed until March 2026 at the earliest. “There are too many consultants on the books and not enough projects in the pipeline. EY would just be paying these kids to sit on the bench.”  (FT) 

US regulators are expected to reduce the supplementary leverage ratio. This requires banks to hold specified amounts of high-quality capital against their total leverage and discourages holding even low risk assets like US treasuries. If it's reduced, banks are likely to take a bigger role in treasury trading. (FT) 

Warren Buffett stepped down because he suddenly started ageing at 90. "He began to lose his balance, occasionally, and sometimes had trouble recalling a person’s name. Suddenly, the newspapers he read looked like they were printed with too little ink." (WSJ)   

Asian Americans hit a "bamboo ceiling" at work. Researchers have found they're seen as “high competence, low warmth”: intelligent and capable, but without emotional closeness. (WSJ)  

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