Morning Coffee: Bank of America’s troublesome dinner guest. Morgan Stanley bankers turn into influencers

One of the most thankless tasks for a banker is organising client dinners.  If you’ve got good contacts at the Federal Reserve or somewhere else important, then it’s a great way to show them off.  But you have to reconcile the schedules and tastes of dozens of people, all of whom think they’re the most important guest.  And then you have to sit around trying to make small talk happen, keeping the bill under control, while everyone waits for the few words of insight that might make the evening worthwhile.

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Nonetheless, bankers continue to do it, because a private dining room with a restricted guest list really is a good way to make clients feel like they’re getting special information that isn’t available to the rest of the market.  The trouble is, of course, that special information is tricky stuff, and there’s a fine line between interesting dinner conversation and something that the compliance department might get interestrted in.

It seems unlikely that anything of that sort happened at the dinner organised by Bank of America to give its clients a chance to talk to Michelle Bowman, Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve.  The Wall Street Journal notes that Ms Bowman refutes very strongly any suggestion that she talked about monetary policy at the table on the evening of June 17, and this is very credible – she’s in charge of banking supervision, not interest rates.

But it was only a few hours after a Federal Open Markets Committee meeting, and Fed officials usually observe a “post-meeting blackout period”, refraining from public comment on the economy so as not to muddy the official message.  That doesn’t mean they’re not allowed to go to dinner or talk to anyone, but it’s unusual.

Now Senator Elizabeth Warren (the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee – Ms Bowman is a Republican appointed by President Trump) is calling for a review by the Fed’s inspector general to examine whether anything improper happened, and whether the rules should be strengthened.  It’s not obvious what that review might consist of; possibly questioning the waiting staff about whether they heard anyone talking about rates trading?  But it will have the effect of keeping the story in the news for a few more weeks, which might be the point.

It will be a bit embarrassing for everyone involved, and it will presumably make it even more difficult to organise this sort of dinner in the future.  Let’s hope that the BoA banker who set it up manages to get some good business out of the event. The clients present might not have got anything useful to trade on, but they now have an absolutely fantastic anecdote to bring up at the next dinner party, whoever hosts it.

Elsewhere, the usual post-banking career for Wall Street women tends to involve things like organic cosmetics, or business friendly athleisure ranges.  But two childhood friends who had previously worked for Morgan Stanley are now making Managing Director money out of their “Wall Street Skinny” podcast, which has 500,000 followers who trust them enough to book $1,400/hr coaching sessions.

They aren’t the only ones. An investor relations executive posted a “day in the life” video on Instagram and got inundated with messages asking how to get into private equity; now she’s got 300,000 followers and is making twice as much as she used to in the job she quit.  And a former Goldman Sachs employee is making $6,000 a minute from promotional videos. 

It sounds too good to be true, and it is.  This is influencer economics, in which you hear an awful lot about the tip and almost nothing about the iceberg.  The median content creator in the USA makes less than $10,000 a year.  And even the success stories might not be as much fun as they seem when edited into a glamourous reel; the work of doing the editing apparently requires almost as many all-nighters and missed social life as being a junior banker.  So realistically, even if you’re as glam and outgoing as the women in this story, the prudent approach might be to stay in banking, and if you want to dream, dream about a boutique hotel or a travel concierge app.

Meanwhile …

Job moves often foretell what’s happening in the markets.  Phil Tseng made his name and fortune as CEO of BlackRock TCP Capital Corp, its publicly traded private credit arm.  After some asset writedowns and questions from the regulators about valuations, he’s apparently leaving, although he may yet stay an employee of the BlackRock organisation. (Bloomberg)

Another alternative career to banking, which would let you make use of advanced skills in dealing with immature people, might be to become the chief executive of a British academy school.  There are several of them earning more than £200k and some breaking the half-million barrier (Guardian)

The numbers are in and H1 2026 has seen record M&A volumes of $2.8trn.  If you were nitpicking, you’d say that there was something of a bias to the USA and to >$5bn “megadeals”, and that’s where the “bias to action” still seems to be.  It’s a good time to be in the bulge bracket. (FT)

Another hot, albeit somewhat specialist, market has been in defence related mergers in the Gulf, and banks are staffing up to take advantage. (Bloomberg)

McKinsey can’t resist the temptation to fine tune its governance structure.  They are reducing their “shareholders’ council” from 30 members to 12 in the hope that it will play a role more like the board of a normal company. (WSJ)

Teresa Heitsenrether is leaving JP Morgan, having joined in 1987 as a trader, ran the prime brokerage and securities services business units and been in charge of AI strategy for the last three years.  CTO Scott Baldry will take on her title of Chief Data and Analytics Officer. (Bloomberg)

From the “what a way to earn a living” files – Meta apparently employed hundreds of contractors to pretend to be teenagers with an interest in disturbing subjects, in order to test the guardrails on different AI models. (NY Post)

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