Morning Coffee: Goldman Sachs' & Barclays' juniors desperate bid to impress women goes awry. BlackRock's bad loan

Ladies, do you like a man who works for Goldman Sachs? How about a man who works for Goldman Sachs, works out five or six days a week, plays the piano and likes to dance? If so, we can recommend Clay Nelson, a 25-year-old associate on Goldman's New York delta one desk. You can find him on Hinge. 

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If not Clay, how about 24-year-old-Mason Clark, who currently has a girlfriend but who looks good pouting on a velvet chaise, works out six days a week, and says mediocrity is his idea of hell?

Alternatively, we can suggest Tommy Doherty Junior, a sultry 25-year-old FX trader at Barclays who wears a Rolex, works out four or five times a week and likes a cold plunge. You can find Tommy on Raya, the members only dating app for celebrities and influencers. If you're not on Raya, swing by the Hudson Hound, an old fashioned Irish pub on Manhattan's Hudson Street. He's often there Thursday nights. 

If the junior bankers above sound appealing, would they still be so if they weren't actually working in banking any more? This is the risk after Clay, Mason and Tommy appeared in a photoshoot for Interview Magazine, titled 'Meet the Finest Boys in Finance.'

What may have seemed like a great idea when Interview Magazine approached the three young bankers on LinkedIn, has turned out very definitely not to be. Clay and Tommy may get more attention on dating apps following their "baby faced" profiles in Interview, and Clay may find solace in new non-mediocre friends, but their employers are not impressed. A spokesman for Goldman Sachs told Bloomberg the firm didn't approve their appearances. Barclays declined to comment on Doherty's comments, but he seemed to realise the error of his ways and the latest iteration of the article online has deleted his name.

It's not clear what the three young bankers' intentions were they agreed to the request from a random journalist. Meeting women may have been subsidiary to appearing in a highly styled photo shoot while flashing a Rolex. Either way, the exercise has badly backfired. As banking influencers on TikTok and elsewhere are finding out, banks don't much like their juniors posting about their lives on social media, let alone appearing in a photoshoot, bragging that they've spent $3k on a jacket. It may be a lesson painfully learned.

Separately, Goldman Sachs' CEO David Solomon says not to worry too much about private credit markets. “We’re watching very closely to see if there’s been a little bit too much aggression, frothiness,” said Solomon yesterday. “While there have been a bunch of idiosyncratic events where there have been problems, the broad portfolios are performing reasonably well.”

One of those idiosyncratic events has occurred at BlackRock, which Bloomberg notes has slashed a loan to zero, three months after marking it at 100 cents on the dollar. 

The loan is small and worth a mere $25m, but value is not the point. As Bloomberg notes, such a sudden and dramatic markdown highlights the lag between the valuation of illiquid loans and the true state of the companies receiving them (in this case, an Amazon aggregator).

Solomon is hopefully heeding the words of his predecessor. Ex-Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein told the Financial Times this week that Goldman avoided large losses in the last financial crisis by "very aggressively marking to market" and making its people sell things just to see if they could. Regularly marking to market isn't the intention with illiquid private credit loans, but hard headed realism might help. As BlackRock's 100% mark down shows, thing can change in a period of months.

Meanwhile....

Market Financial Solutions, the mortgage company that's collapsed into insolvency, leaving banks with hundreds of millions in losses, threw staff parties costing hundreds of thousands of pounds. Last Christmas, there was a party at the five-star Peninsula Hotel where workers watched a pair of dancers perform inside a giant glass dome.  (Bloomberg) 

Asif Goodall, the head of markets for EMEA at Mizuho and an ex-portfolio manager at Polus Capital Management, says he reviewed an investment in MFS in 2019 and turned it down. "The portfolio managers identified that some loans were being moved between SPVs. When queried, they were told the assets were being “re‑bridged”. This had not been disclosed upfront and naturally raised further questions around asset valuations and liquidity." (LinkedIn)

If you receive a message from a colleague on WhatsApp saying "What's up?", don't answer it. It's a Phishing attempt by your employer. (Financial News) 

Significant risk transfers are all the rage. Banks issued $41bn of SRTs in 2025, up from $29bn in 2024 and they're up another 20% this year.  (Financial Times) 

It's not easy being a macro trader now. “I’m not even sure Trump knows what Trump thinks, let alone a macro fund.” (Financial News)  

It's not easy selling a leveraged loan now. “If you miss a week — as we may have just done — that can mean the difference between executing what you want to execute and not executing. We’re currently in a time where hitting that market window has become that much more important...If you’re not ready to launch in 24 hours. you’re not ready.” (Bloomberg) 

JPMorgan was the sole financer of the $55bn Electronic Arts Inc leveraged buyout last year. It's since syndicated the loan. Next week, it and other banks will attempt to sell a $10.5bn offering to the US market and €4bn to Europe. (Bloomberg) 

Taproot Management, the hedge fund aiming to deliver multistrategy returns without expensive portfolio managers, has lost money. (Business Insider) 

The cost of living in the UAE now involves a private jet to fly in and out of the UK so as not to exceed the number of residency days that will trigger a UK tax bill. Spending more than 183 days in a country typically results in becoming tax resident in that country. (Financial Times) 

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