Look Who's Hiring Now

Yes, the unit that HSBC can never seems to make up its mind about, is apparently back on the hire. According to Financial News, the firm is in the market particularly for equities hires, beefing up the area it 'drastically' cut back in 2005 and 2006.

In the meantime, Bloomberg reports that Goldman Sachs and Societe Generale got around $11.4bn in collateral calls from AIG in the 15 months leading up to the insurer's bailout. The news agency quotes Charles Calomiris, a finance professor at Columbia Business School, who said: 'It was precisely that drain of liquidity to Goldman and SocGen that put AIG in a position of illiquidity and ultimately threw them into the government's arms'.

And The New York Times reports that US billionaire Len Blavatnik is to sue JPMorgan Chase over allegations that one of his companies, Access Industries, lost $98m after being misled into investing in mortgage-backed securities-related instruments. A spokesperson for Access said that the same time the bank bought the securities for the company it was itself 'unwinding its positions in similar instruments'. JPMorgan said that it intends to 'vigorously defend' the matter.

The New York Post reports that, according to Thomson Reuters, Morgan Stanley is currently top dog in global M&A this year, advising on some $175bn worth of deals.

And The Financial Times reports that Royal Bank of Scotland will unveil CEO Stephen Hester's new compensation package this week. The package, which has the support of large shareholders, provides Hester with a $1.97m salary, $3.3m of annual non-cash bonus, and $10.5m of long-term incentive awards.

Finally, The Guardian reports that lunch with Warren Buffett probably won't go for as much this year (bearing in mind the recession, etc). Every year the Sage auctions off a lunch with himself for charity. Last year's winner paid a record $1.2m, but no-one's expecting that record to be broken in 2009.