Morning Coffee: How idiots mess up Morgan Stanley applications. The forgotten cabal within Deutsche Bank

Morning Coffee: How idiots mess up Morgan Stanley applications. The forgotten cabal within Deutsche Bank

14 October 2014, 09:33
Ronnie Mansolillo
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If you’re a student and you want to work for Morgan Stanley, you’d better put in an impeccable application. As Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman explained this summer, Morgan Stanley receives 90,000 applications for its summer analyst and associate programmes. Only 1,000 of those applicants receive job offers: 99% are rejected.

In the circumstances, you might think that anyone applying to Morgan Stanley would be super-vigilant in matters of self-presentation.-  Anything belying an applicant’s true identity as a heavy-drinking, hard-partying, social media junkie would surely be expunged from the internet in general and from Morgan Stanley application materials in particular. You’d be wrong. Speaking from what we imagine was bitter experience, two Morgan Stanley managing directors who presented at a U.S. university this week, felt it necessary to caution students against writing ‘LOL’ in their application emails. They also cautioned against an unlocked Facebook account containing photographs of yourself in a state of inebriation, or stepping into a Morgan Stanley interview when you don’t know that James Gorman is the name of the chief executive. With students still making mistakes like this,rejecting 89,000 of them is clearly a no-brainer.

Separately, everyone knows that Anshu Jain has hired a lot of MBAs from the Indian Institute of Management to work at Deutsche Bank and that Deutsche has – in the past at least - also hired a lot of other Indian nationals into its fixed income business, but Deutsche’s roots in Merrill Lynch’s fixed income business had been almost forgotten. – Until now. The Financial Times points out that deep within Deutsche is a ‘Merrill Lynch’ gang comprised of ‘dozens of senior traders’ who joined the German bank from Merrill in the 1990s. Anshu Jain himself is one of them. Colin Fan is another. In the circumstances, Michele Foresti’s attempted move from Deutsche to head of up Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s (BAML) fixed income business is likely to have fluffed up some feathers. Unfortunately, Foresti’s Merrill move may come to nothing – Bloomberg recently reported that BAML is close to rescinding its offer because Foresti can’t seem to get regulatory clearance. Will the ex-Merrill bankers at Deutsche have him back? Unlikely.

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