If you havent yet heard of James Langman, you soon will. The Oxford Union president-elect, studying Chemistry at University College, saw his internship hopes vanish when his employers discovered he’d been using the work computer to look for strip clubs and porn shops. The poor fella. A loser-geek all his life, finally saw a way of getting out of his sadness through a heroic I-Banking job, and then goes and fucks it all up. Good job dumbass. Jaime-boy apparently used an in-house online information service to ask: “Where is a good strip club?” and “Where’s the nearest porn shop?”. Bloomberg, who runs the service, apparently picked up the inappropriate searches and tipped off his managers.
Even crazier is the fact that in a talk two weeks back he apparently asked how Morgan Stanley could consider itself a meritocracy if it wanted to attract women and encourage them to progress up the corporate ladder at the bank. Not necessarily a bad question, but probably not one that you want to be asking in front of hundreds of collegues. Another intern said of the incident: “Others in the room groaned and the executive told James that he was offended by the question”
Whatever the case, James’ parents, two dentists, can’t be too happy with their boy prodigy. He’s now even facing calls to resign from his post as president-elect of the Union even before he started!
Well James, if its any consolation, there’s a ‘gentlemen’s club’ in Canary Wharf called Majingo’s, about a 5-10 minute walk from MS offices. Not sure about the nearest porn shop though.
Poor old prop traders. Used to be the kings of the jungle, the biggest swinging dicks of them all. But things seem to be changing with the new era of financial reform. The Wall Street Journal reported last week on changes at JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs with regards to their prop trading units. JP Morgan was said to have fired up to 50 people in its fledgling commodities unit after a weak second quarter capped by a coal bet gone bad. But more generally the bank seems to be cutting ahead of the new restrictions coming into effect. Goldman Sachs was reported to have been doing a similar thing, evaluating various options for its prop trading business. So far these options seem to include transferring the unit to its asset management arm, winding down the portfolio alltogether, or spinning its operations out into a separate hedge fund. The latter is supposedly the least favourable option. And Reuters last week came out with an interesting article about lthe difficulties that prop traders may face with a move to a hedge fund.
According to Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at The London School of Economics and Political Science, 
For a man who will probably have something about the merits of the “Universal Banking Model” written on his epitaph, it seem strange that Bob Diamond would be keen on a split between Barclays Capital and its parent, Barclays. And yet, 
