Morale at Barclays in New York plummeted last week after the bank fired Justin Kwan, a junior banker, for sending a jokey e-mail to the new crop of interns, which was highlighted on last Sunday’s Business cover, Kevin Dugan reports.
The June 3 e-mail from Kwan, a second-year analyst in the bank’s Power Group, told the baby-faced bankers-to-be that “if you can’t handle the heat, get out of the kitchen,” and that they should “bring extra ties to be used as napkins for their superiors.”
After Kwan was fired three days later, bummed-out Barclays employees have inundated managers’ in-boxes with questions about what they can and cannot say for fear of being let go, according to two bankers.
Barclays’ frat-boy culture — which Kwan bragged about in his e-mail — may be tough to change, one Wall Street insider told On the Money, since holdovers from Lehman Brothers, which used to informally hold “open bikini contests,” still run many of the desks there.
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