This would ordinarily qualify for the weekly piece of Friday humor, if only it wasn't too real. Bloomberg reports [6]that everyone's favorite Federal Reserve overseer - JPMorgan Chase - is being sued by a trader who says he accepted a contract from the investment bank because a typographical error made him believe he would be paid 10 times what was actually offered. "Kai Herbert, a Switzerland-based currency trader, is suing JPMorgan for about 580,000 pounds ($920,000), his lawyers said at a trial in London this week. The original contract said Herbert’s annual pay would be 24 million rand ($3.1 million). JPMorgan blamed the mistake on a typographical error and said the figure should have been 2.4 million rand, according to court documents." Ok, so the guy is an idiot and somehow never understood what he was getting paid until after he looked at the contract. What people really want to know is if he pulled an Alex Hope and spent more than his entire post-typo paycheck on a bottle of champagne at Zurich's douchiest night club. In other news, bankers everywhere are trying to track down their employment contracts to see if they are "owed" far more than they are getting due to confusion between decimal and '000s commas.
More on this hilarious story: [6]
“That must have been the moment your heart sank,” Judge Henry Globe said at the trial this week, referring to when Herbert discovered the mistake. Herbert resigned from UBS AG (UBSN) in June 2010 following the offer from JPMorgan to relocate to Johannesburg. Herbert didn’t report for work after discovering the discrepancy and JPMorgan rescinded the employment offer in December 2010.
In retrospect, it seems that heatmap momentum chasing junkies who use 500x leverage, and don't clarify terms of their employment before being employed, are not in short supply.
He has been unemployed since, other than eight months at Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN) where he was fired in a round of layoffs in November. Banks globally have cut about 196,000 jobs since the start of 2011, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
For once, JPM actually makes sense:
“How can you possibly suggest that they would pay you so much money for an executive director level job?” Charles Ciumei, a lawyer for JPMorgan, asked during Herbert’s cross- examination. The bank said Herbert could have mitigated his lost earnings by taking the position at the New York-based bank.
At the end of the day, it appears that no $310K now is somehow better than no $3.1 million never, all to chase a bouncing ball. And people wonder why Wall Streeters are sometimes perceived as greedy idiots by the general population.