We have long observed that Marianne Lake at JPMorgan is an interesting person. With her flat English estuary accent, she is an anomaly in the upper echelons of Wall Street. She started in the middle office and she became JPMorgan's CFO. She's a single mother with three children born through a surrogate. She's been described as "fearless" by juniors.
Last Thursday, though, the Financial Times reports that Lake was 'abruptly axed.' After 26 years at JPMorgan and with an alleged $50m of deferred stock accumulated, she was reportedly given three days' notice that Doug Petno and Troy Rohrbaugh were being elevated above her as heir apparents to JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon. At 6.45am last Thursday, the FT says Lake invited employees working directly with her to join a call at 7.30am. She told them she was leaving. She was 'emotional '; they cried. She hasn't been seen in the office since.
JPMorgan declined to offer additional commentary for this article and we haven't spoken to Lake herself. It's not clear why a former favourite disappeared so suddenly. There are unconfirmed suggestions that Lake and Dimon hadn't been getting along, but JPMorgan strenuously denied this to the FT. There are unconfirmed suggestions that Lake talks too fast, can be heavy-handed and rules through a chain of command. But there are also suggestions that Lake is accessible, "brilliant", hyper-intelligent and capable of diving "down multiple layers of the organisation to get the best information.”
There are also suggestions that Lake and Dimon are very similar, making her a seemingly good option for replacing him. They seem to have got along: the FT notes that, along with other executives, Lake accompanied Dimon on his annual summer bus tour across the US to visit JPMorgan's 5,000 branches. “She has all of the qualities of a great leader" Dimon declared in happier days of 2018. She is an "extraordinarily talented executive," he added back then.
That was nearly a decade ago. Now, Dimon presumably thinks that Petno - a man with a great sense of humour - or that Rohrbaugh, a 56-year-old former FX derivatives trader who helped earn JPMorgan hundreds of millions of dollars during the financial crisis, have even better qualities. Rohrbaugh is considered the frontrunner. Rohrbaugh likes people to work in the office and was once president of a university fraternity that threw shoes into trees.
Separately, being drunk and crashing your car into multiple vehicles before refusing two breathalyser tests might be considered a career-ending experience for some. However, after pleading guilty in court and accepting full responsibility for his actions, Bloomberg notes that Joel Thickins, the "aggressive and clever" co-head of Asia at private equity firm TPG, will be staying in his role.
Thickins is not the only senior financial services executive to survive a driving offence. Citi equities trader Michael Furnham crashed his car while intoxicated with his two children in the back seat in 2012 and was subsequently disqualified by FINRA. However, Furnham also expressed his penitence and attended alcohol treatment programmes, and Citi petitioned FINRA for him to stay on. He remains in employment at the bank today.
Meanwhile...
- A judge ruled that JPMorgan must pay Charlie Javice's $142m legal bill. This includes lawyers charging $2.7k an hour, a $26k hotel room upgrade and $500+ on Gummy Bears. JPMorgan plans to keep disputing this. Charlie Javice sold JPMorgan her start-up, Frank, in 2021, but she has been sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulently claiming to have more users than she did. A clause in the deal said JPMorgan would pay her legal fees. (WSJ)
- UBS wants to be a full-service bank in the Americas, offering checking accounts and savings accounts as well as investment management products. (Financial Times)
- The Swiss government wants to force UBS to raise the amount of common equity capital it holds domestically against its foreign operations to 100% of each unit’s equity value, from 60% at present. UBS does not want to do this. (Bloomberg)
- Another rates guy left UBS. Citi hired Matteo Dan who was UBS's head of rates hedge fund sales. (Financial News)
- Hedge funds account for 30% of transactions in the gilt trading market and now the bank of England wants to restrict how much hedge funds can borrow short term in the repo market while using gilts as collateral. Some big hedge funds think this will advantage them as smaller ones drop out. (FT)
- Chinese quant funds have adopted AI and their AUM have more than doubled in less than a year to more than 2.6 trillion yuan. (Bloomberg)
- Some DeepMind alumni set up an AI trading lab and it's valued at $500m. “I’m not doing this because I’m excited about making markets efficient. I’m doing this because we are all excited about building new things that have never been built before, and this is a lot of fun to build.” (Techcrunch)
- Whale Rock, a Boston-based hedge fund, is up 72.5% this year. It invested in Sandisk, SK Hynix, and Anthropic. (Bloomberg)
- Private credit funds have honoured less than 40% of the redemption requests they have received. (FT)
- Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund has $1.2 trillion in assets but it's made some bad investments and now needs to spend a lot on infrastructure and defence. (WSJ)
- Apollo invested in a chain of Hispanic grocery stores. Now it can't sell it because Trump is clamping down on immigrants. (FT)
- Forgive your annoying elders. "I viewed one of my very first managers, who I had a fiery relationship with, very differently years later. I saw how I had looked to him back then as I got the interior view of a young VP at Goldman Sachs managing a small team for the first time. I can say almost for certain he was just as frustrated with the headstrong analyst who would very shortly resign as I was with him." (Substack)
- Children of Goldman Sachs bankers will be fine. The firm is giving them all $1k for their Trump accounts. (NY Post)
- GLP-1 drugs give single women a dramatic 29 percentage point increase in their chances of coupling up. On average, their new partners are richer than them. (FT)
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