Morning Coffee: 26-year-old Goldman Sachs banker's 5.30am videos ended her career. HSBC's proposed perk removal

If you work for Goldman Sachs and are thinking of making TikTok videos about your daily routine, think again. Goldman Sachs does not look kindly upon such things. Nor do other banks.

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The New York Times says Allison Sheehan, an analyst in Goldman Sachs' private wealth division in New York made videos of her routine for her TikTok channel, but did not mention Goldman Sachs. Going by the name "investment baker," she instead detailed adventures baking elaborate cakes at 5.30am, before going to the gym at 6.50am and to the office for 8.20am. Sheehan says she never filmed inside the Goldman office and she didn't much mention the bank at all: it was all about the juxtaposition of "baking and being a financier" and showing that it was possible to have a life outside of work. 

Goldman Sachs did not seem to like this. In 2024, the firm reportedly called Sheehan aside and told her that her channel was a "reputational risk". She was asked to delete every post and to change her handle so that it made no mention of the word "investment." Sheehan complied. And then she didn't. Three months' later, she put all her videos back up. Goldman's compliance team called her in again. And now she makes cakes full time. 

Sheehan's experience is a warning to anyone who plans to become an influencer on the back of their investment banking job: the two things are not compatible. Others have discovered this too. Last year, an associate at RBC created a popular TikTok channel complaining about long hours and a lack of sleep. Her account was spotted by HR and has since been made private. Juliet Mackay is still making TikTok videos at Bank of America, but doesn't work in the front office any more. 

Goldman Sachs hasn't commented for this article, but there may be more to Sheehan's Goldman Sachs exit than the TikToks. In a previous Business Insider article, she said she'd burned out while working for Goldman and making cakes and studying for the General Record Examination (GRE) as part of an MBA application. "My health deteriorated, and I broke down at work, having a panic attack and sobbing to my very understanding VP," Sheehan told BI. She was also penniless from simultaneously running a commercial cake baking kitchen on the Lower East Side. 

Maybe the moral of the story is that getting up at 5am to bake commercial cakes is incompatible with banking jobs, irrespective of the videos. 

Separately, being a senior expat banker at HSBC in Hong Kong might not be as prestigious as it was.

Gone, seemingly, are the heady days of 2010 when Michael Geoghegan, HSBC's then-CEO, received a £300k cost of living allowance to ease his passage to Hong Kong, plus the right to live in a large house owned by HSBC on the "Peak" overlooking Hong Kong Harbour. HSBC's most recent annual report indicated that current CEO Georges Elhedery received only £170k in taxable and non-taxable benefits for last year, including the use of a car and a "club." 

This was possibly because Elhedery was flying in and out of Hong Kong instead of actually living there, but it may also be because HSBC has been cutting costs under his leadership. Bloomberg reports that this cost cutting might hit HSBC's willingness to pay school fees for Hong Kong bankers' children. The bank has reportedly been paying "hundreds" of its Hong Kong bankers $38.3k per child. It is having second thoughts. 

These thoughts appear to be occurring after Elhedery spent the opening months of this year living in Hong Kong to avoid the slog of long distance travel. There may be a cool reception from some senior bankers the next time he turns up there.

Meanwhile...

Microsoft and Meta are cutting staff but it won't affect performance because they have simply been hoarding talent anyway. (Semafor) 

One person asked if Meta staff would receive their August 15 stock payouts, which are part of some employees' compensation packages. They were told they will not. (Business Insider) 

Boutique bank Lincoln International is going for an IPO. (Reuters) 

Goldman Sachs had a quantum computing team until it discovered that it would need to run an algorithm for millions of years in order to solve a problem. And that the processor would need to have at least 8 million so-called logical qubits, while current machines only have 100. (Bloomberg) 

Working for XTX is not about making trading systems but overseeing an army of algorithms that rely on “deep learning” models that predict price moves that can be milliseconds, minutes or hours away. Alex Gerko is an exacting and hands on manager who is omnipresent on Slack. (WSJ) 

The problem with private credit. “There’s a prisoner’s dilemma going on. If everyone stays, we’re fine. But if I stay while everyone else asks out, and the fund sells its most liquid, high-quality loans to redeem them, I’m now worse off.” If publicly traded Business Development Companies run by private credit funds announce share buybacks along with their coming results, it will be a sign that they are confident in their valuations. (WSJ) 

If Keir Starmer is ousted then British banks might find that the bank surcharge rises from 3% to 8%. Senior regulators are warning about a sovereign debt crisis. (Financial Times)

Last year, banks in the UK struck an informal bargain - keep taxes steady and we’ll keep lending into the economy. That looks harder to sustain now. (FT) 

Barclays has got an idea. -It's told the UK government it could increase demand for gilts by £150bn and cut Treasury borrowing costs by £2.5bn a year if it just ditches capital requirements on banks’ holdings of government bonds. (FT) 

Instead of asking senior partners to retire, Big Four firms have started asking them to become salaried partners instead. “There are a lot of senior partners . . . holding on to significant units but they’re not actually working with any particular clients.”  (FT) 

US law firms like Jones Day and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton want employees at their Dubai and Abu Dhabi sites to return to work in person as soon as next week. (FT)

Former Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein was sitting with CBS News journalists toward the front of the room when the emergency occurred. As the confusion unfolded, Blankfein turned to his seatmate and asked, “Are you going to finish that salad? (Hindustan Times) 

Was at the WH Correspondents dinner last night, a rare DC trip for me without a subpoena. On the positive side—was exciting, no one was killed, and ended early. I noted a new litmus for status among the gov’t elite—whether you were whisked away by secret service, or left to fend.

— Lloyd Blankfein (@lloydblankfein) April 26, 2026

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