Morning Coffee: Bold youth makes banking recruiters beg. Latent rage against financial crisis manifests in whole new form

If you're a student and you want a job in financial services when you graduate, there are several ways to get in. The standard route involves following the recruiting timeline and faithfully applying for all the right internships (while loading your CV into the eFC resume database) before gliding into a banking job when your course is over. However, if this fails, and you don't feel like doing a Masters/joining the Big Four/doing something else and then paying for the kind of top MBA that attracts banks' attention, there is another alternative.

You can stand on the street with your CV.

It's a technique that's been applied many times over the years, and that can still be put to good effect. 24-year-old Haider Malik is its latest implementor.

Malik graduated with a first class degree in banking and finance from Middlesex University, a UK university which ranks somewhere between 700th and 750th in the world according to the QS Top Universities guide. Having skipped the standard internship process, Malik didn't have a résumé filled with finance experience - he'd worked a "team coach" for Metro (a retail bank), but that was about it. Most recently, he'd been a delivery driver for Uber Eats in London (possibly delivering dinners to people at Morgan Stanley). 

But Malik was both bold and keen. In early November, he got up at 6am and stood outside Canary Wharf Station in London's financial district with hard copies of CV, a board displaying QR codes of his CV, and the same board proclaiming his first class qualification and willingness to work. 

Malik now has a job as a treasury assistant for Canary Wharf Group. He was offered interviews within hours of occupying his pitch. Suddenly, says Malik, his phone went so crazy with recruiters wanting to talk that he needed an unofficial PA. - "For the first three days my phone was non-stop ringing, it never stopped ringing and LinkedIn was really busy. It was going crazy, and I had to have my family help me to respond to direct messages and get in contact with people.” Recruiters who'd ignored him for six months suddenly got in contact with advice on how to improve his application. 

Malik isn't the first person to find a job by making himself prominent on London's streets. Bath University graduate James Elgeti walked around with a sandwich board in 2011 and today works as a vice president at RBC capital markets.

Separately, London software engineer Stephen Diel has written a blog about crypto and that blog has gone viral. Diel isn't a crypto believer: he describes it as resembling a "set of incoherent ideas attached to so many get rich quick schemes."

Crypto is fundamentally a form of securities regulation arbitrage that gives VC firms an opportunity to return money to their limited partners (LPs) without leaping through all the traditional regulatory hoops, says Diel. It's not software innovation; it's financial innovation. It, "looks like a security, swims like a security, and quacks like a security, but is not regulated as a security. In fact, it’s not regulated at all."

You can issue crypto tokens without a prospectus. You don't need revenue or profits. It's like the 1920s all over again, says Diel. "You can insider trade, wash trade, and pump and dump and there’s basically no enforcement." 

Ultimately, he suggests that crypto is embodied rage against the financial elite for the financial crisis, manifested as a means of issuing financial products without the use of the established system. It's also "greed untempered by reason." No one will persuade Diel otherwise. "All conversation around crypto is now simply the sound and fury of post-hoc myth making to rationalize away the collective incoherence of the bubble in a near perfect exemplar of the motivated reasoning of economic determinism," he postulates.

Meanwhile...

Appetite for crypto isn't quite so frothy in the face of a potentially pernicious new variant of the virus. (Bloomberg) 

Goldman Sachs is also now offering $5k in quarantine compensation to staff in Hong Kong. (Bloomberg) 

Jes Staley has gone back to America. (Bloomberg)

Barclays' chairman Nigel Higgens says Jes Staley's emails to Jeffrey Epstein are "uncomfortable" to read because they're so effusive. (This is Money)

KPMG's London private members' club shut in March 2020 after the audit regulator said it was being used for 'excessive hospitality' and hasn't reopened. The door is chained shut. (Financial News) 

Mr Goxx, the crypto trading hamster, died. Goxx ran on his "intention wheel" to select which cryptocurrency he'd like to trade and then entered a buy or sell tunnel on his office floor. When he selected a tunnel, the trades were made automatically. He had 18,000 Twitter followers. (BBC)

Veteran fund manager Martin Gilbert says his career was never about money and that he would have made more money were this the case. (The Times) 

A junior lawyer at Allen & Overy left a briefcase with highly confidential Credit Suisse documents on a train and now Credit Suisse won't work with Allen & Overy anymore. (Roll on Friday) 

Women perceive emojis more negatively than men. They tend to suppose the thinking emoji is a bad thing. (WSJ)

Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com in the first instance. Whatsapp/Signal/Telegram also available (Telegram: @SarahButcher)

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