Morning Coffee: Deutsche Bank VP says he was fired for "Hello Kitty" comment. A good year for traders, bad for bankers

If you work for Deutsche Bank in New York, you need to watch your language. Teutonic puns are inadvisable. So are ill-thought references to "Hello Kitty," the iconic fictional white cat with a pink hair bow that's popular with teenage girls.

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Noah Ramos, the former head of operations for the Americas at Deutsche's private bank, spoke freely of Hello Kitty at Christmas 2023. The cat featured on some wrapping paper used in the office, and Ramos reportedly said he liked it. An Asian employee heard this Hello Kitty chat; so too did a white female employee, who complained to HR that Ramos was insensitive. Deutsche Bank then fired him for anti-Asian bias. Ramos got a mark on his regulatory filing saying that he'd committed an EEO (equal opportunity) transgression. No one else wants to hire him.

That was April 2024. 12 months later, Ramos is back with a court case claiming that his Hello Kitty firing was "absurd and false." He says the real reason he was fired had nothing to do with the cat with the hair bow and everything to do with his refusal to go along with a plan concocted by Deutsche Bank to mislead the banking regulators. In his version of events, the Hello Kitty complainant was merely a stooge put up by Deutsche Bank to help get rid of him.

Deutsche Bank, needless to say, denies everything and plans to "vigorously" defend itself. 

Ramos wants $100m in damages. He says specifically that not long after he was made head of Americas operations in October 2023, he discovered that Deutsche had wrongly accrued $173 million in receivables due to “a lack of operational controls and general negligence in operations.” He says he told senior executives at DB, who ignored him and seemed to want to recognise the loss in other units. Worse, he says he heard the senior executives "laughing and joking" about the Federal Reserve's acceptance of their false story about accounting errors. 

Deutsche Bank says it investigated all Ramos's claims at the time and there was nothing in them. But when the Hello Kitty incident occurred, the bank's HR team went into overdrive. Ramos says he was subject to “repeated five-to-ten hour long integration sessions” with HR after he mentioned the cat. Then he was fired. Watch what you say about cats. 

Separately, while bankers are discovering that deals aren't flowing freely in 2025, salespeople and traders are having a fine time. 

Macro traders, for example, are preparing themselves for Trump's tariff announcements tomorrow and saying things like, “It has been very hard to position for Trump’s policy announcements as they seem quite erratic, perhaps by design.”

IFRE notes that BCG Expand is predicting a 7-9% markets revenues pools year-on-year in the first quarter, with a 25% increase in equities revenues.

Things are going great. "Shifting narratives" around AI and tariffs have created trading opportunities. It's the right kind of volatility. Clients have been "rebalancing portfolios" says one trading executive; prime brokerage revenues are growing rapidly. For the moment at least, bankers might well wish they'd chosen a different path.

Meanwhile...

HSBC probably won't want to partner with Citadel Securities in FX trading. HSBC reported just under US$1bn of revenues in credit and rates trading last year. But it made almost US$4bn in FX trading. That's a lot to lose. (IFRE) 

EY plans to cut a lot of middle managers. (Financial News) 

Banks in London are shunning Canary Wharf. They've taken up five times more space in the City in the past five years. (Financial News) 

The US bank capital requirements complex, an infographic. (Conks) 

Goldman Sachs wants someone to manage its fleet of private jets. It will pay $160k for an associate. (Business Insider) 

What if AI replaces senior people instead of juniors? Senior people are the ones zooming out to ask big-picture questions, thinking about analogous situations with counterintuitive answers, knowing who to contact for additional advice, etc. And these are all the kinds of questions that, with a bit of diligence and humility, you can get from an LLM. (The Diff) 

You can make $160k a year as a high-end nanny and £300k-£500k a year as a high-end housekeeper. You don't need a degree. (New Yorker) 

Schwarzman recalling how he got his first job on Wall Street: pic.twitter.com/TXvakW0uah

— Jay Vas (@jayvas) March 30, 2025

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