Trading Places, August 9, 2010

JPM loses in London and Singapore
JP Morgan has lost Ramesh Swamy in Singapore and Richard Griffiths in London, according to market sources. Swamy was a managing director and head of FX sales for Asia, excluding Japan, reporting to Mahesh Bulchandani, head of fixed-income sales and structuring for Asia-Pacific. Sources speculate he will move to a financial institutions sales role at Standard Chartered. Meanwhile, in London, Griffiths left his role as an executive director in FX quantitative research. It is unclear where he is moving to. JP Morgan and Standard Chartered declined to comment.

Citi's hires head of e-trading product in Asia
Citi has appointed Ian Smith as head of electronic execution product for Asia-Pacific from Credit Suisse, where he was head of advanced execution services product for the same region. Based in Hong Kong, Smith will report to Paul Sanger, head of execution services for Asia-Pacific. Smith will work closely with Ben Valentine, head of electronic execution sales and trading, leading a team of five working on providing solutions to clients in the electronic execution area. Citi is looking to hire across the sales and trading team over the coming months. Sanger said: "Ian's market knowledge, experience in creating execution platforms and client relationships will be instrumental in helping drive our business forward in this area, which is a major strategic priority."

ODL's global head of trading quits
Alex MacKinnon, global head of trading at retail FX broker ODL, resigned in July, according to market sources. MacKinnon joined ODL as head of trading in 2004 from broker ADM Investor Services International, where he was the desk head of institutional FX. He was previously head of FX at Linnco Europe. ODL was bought out by US retail FX broker FXCM in May. It is unclear where MacKinnon is moving to and he could not be reached for comment.

BAML rehuffles institutional FX sales team
Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAML) has re-structured its FX institutional sales team in London and has brought in emerging markets experts Jonathan Harding and Pam Sotiropolous Frigo, according to an internal source. Harding, head of interest rates emerging markets (EM) trading, and Frigo, head of EM spot trading, have joined as a managing director and director, respectively, in the institutional sales team. They report locally to Graham Wintersgill, head of institutional FX sales for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and were brought in to strengthen the institutional FX sales team in the EMEA region.

Deutsche shakes it up at the top
Deutsche Bank has appointed Neha Bakshi as head of global markets investment products (GMIP) for south Asia. Bakshi, who will transfer to Singapore from Hong Kong, is currently head of rates structuring for north Asia and head of asset-side commodities structuring for Asia.

Separately, Deutsche Bank has promoted Michael Chang in Hong Kong as head of GMIP for north Asia from head of GMIP for greater China. Both Bakshi and Chang report to Chris Lee, the new managing director and head of GMIP and db-X for Asia in Hong Kong.

Lee was previously head of equity risk management products sales and of the cross-divisional intermediary business in Asia for UBS. He replaces Nitin Nath, who left the job a week ago but remains at the bank. Lee will be responsible for Deutsche Bank's multi-asset third-party and in-house retail and private bank sales platform, along with its listed investment products platform, which includes certificates, structured notes, funds, warrants and exchange-traded funds. For GMIP, Lee will report to Anjul Oberai and Shen Yan, co-heads of institutional client coverage. For his db-x role, he will report to Bhupinder Singh, head of structuring and the institutional client group for Asia.

US economic adviser Romer quits
Christina Romer, the chair of the White House's Council of Economic Advisers, last Thursday evening resigned from her post amid speculation she is a contender to head the San Francisco Federal Reserve.

Media reports have said Romer is keen to succeed Janet Yellen as president of the San Francisco Fed, when Yellen leaves to become vice-chairman of the Fed's board of governors in Washington, DC. The Senate Banking Committee approved Yellen's nomination, with some bipartisan support for her candidacy, at the end of July. It is expected she will be confirmed in the post when the upper chamber reopens for business following the summer break on September 13. However, a White House statement said Romer will return to her post as an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in September. She cited family commitments as the reason behind her departure. Her husband, David Romer, is an economics professor at Berkeley.

Romer's departure comes on the heels of that of Peter Orszag, President Barack Obama's budget director, who resigned at the end of June, and has renewed concern of tensions among the administration's top economic policymakers. While he officially cited exhaustion and the need to plan for his upcoming wedding as the reasons for his resignation, Orszag's departure is thought to have been prompted by his frustration with the Obama administration's efforts to tackle the country's burgeoning fiscal deficit. The government projects the deficit will hit 10.64% of GDP, or $1.46 trillion, at the end of this year. As a proportion of output, it has climbed just under 7.5 percentage points since 2008. While Orszag was in favour of the administration's short-term spending programmes to boost aggregate demand and alleviate unemployment pressures, he is thought to have preferred a more conservative long-term fiscal approach.

There has also been reported friction between Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board and the architect of the eponymous rule, and Lawrence Summers, the director of the National Economic Council. While both men have played down a conflict, Volcker's thinking on stricter regulation is thought to be at odds with Summers's more forgiving approach and close ties to Wall Street. Personality clashes are also thought to have created tensions between the pair.

Romer's resignation from the three-member council is expected to result in Austan Goolsbee, who is also the chief economist on the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, being made interim chair. Cecilia Rouse, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton, is the council's third member.