By now, many people have heard about that guy in Newport who keeps asking the local council to let him excavate their landfill site.  He used to have a mining rig in the early days of bitcoin, but had some bad luck and lost his hard drive, so in principle, there are hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of magic numbers buried among the town’s unrecyclable garbage.

Considering his position helps you understand the labour market for investment bankers at the moment, weirdly enough.  They can’t bear to give up on dreams of a buried pot of gold.

It might be considered a bit early to be writing off 2025 – a lot can change in a couple of quarters in the investment banking industry – but a lot has already changed. It’s almost exactly three months since David Solomon of Goldman Sachs said about equity capital markets and M&A revenues, “I think in 2025 we will certainly be at 10-year averages. We might even be ahead of 10-year average”.