Something seems to be afoot at Credit Suisse. Last week, the Swiss bank quietly parted company with Warwick Palmer, its head of G10 EM/FX spot trading who only worked there 12 months. Now, it’s hired in a new senior emerging markets trader who spent a long time at Deutsche Bank but had the misfortune to join Haitong Securities just before it decided to slim down.
Credit Suisse’s new trader is Jamil Hallak, a former managing director of emerging markets trading at Haitong Securities in London. As we reported last week, Haitong has cut its headcount by 67% and Hallak – who only worked there seven months – left in April. Before Haitong, Hallak spent five and a half years at Deutsche Bank in Dubai. Credit Suisse has clearly picked him up at a competitive rate late in the season – there’ll be no bonuses to buyout given that he’s been out of the market since the start of the second quarter.
Credit Suisse’s changes to its emerging markets business come amidst concerns that rising interest rates and proposals to reverse quantitative easing could reduce investor appetite for emerging market debt as yields rise elsewhere. Although Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, Jefferies, and Nomura have all been adding staff to their emerging markets businesses this year, banking intelligence firm Coalition said emerging markets macro trading revenues fell 2% across the market in the first half of this year compared to the same period of 2016.
There are signs that Credit Suisse is trying to put its global markets house in order as we go into the fourth quarter. Palmer isn’t the only exit this month: Jim Buccola, the former global head of Credit Suisse’s huge securitized products trading business also left, and was replaced by Joe Steffa, a trader hired from RBS in 2013.
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