Well,

some of the news on the Bloomberg News Wire that's getting a lot of readership today is about two of Wall Street's largest investment banks are rolling out measures that may ease junior bankers workloads amid complaints across the industry that weekly hours are increasingly creeping past 100 hours per week. Sri Natarajan joins us, he covers all the big investment banks. He's a senior finance reporter for Bloomberg News. He joins us here on our studio. Sri, so I guess bankers, they've always been known, particularly the junior bankers, for working long hours. And I know that kind of during the financial, I mean, you know, during the pandemic, that became a recurring issue of concern. Where are we today in terms of how are we going to ease some of the workload for some of those junior bankers? I

mean, what you're saying is deja vu all over again, right? It just feels like we come back to the same topic every few years, not a surprise that it's often tied to the time when we are starting to see an upswing in deals. The last time this did become a big issue was back during the pandemic, remember the phase, probably a few months after the pandemic, when companies suddenly needed this massive funding needs, all the investment banking firms were working overtime on that, that turned into deal making opportunities. And then you had the 2021 SPAC boom and whatnot. And that viral presentation out of Goldman Sachs and those junior bankers that really caused a stir in the industry. What happened back then you had pay rises across Yeah, all of Wall Street all the firms were raising their base salary for the junior bankers and these are Kids right out of college who in their first second third year are standing to make two hundred three hundred thousand dollars at these firms it's become part of the conversation again a because there has been an uptaking deal after a bit of a lull for a year, 18 months. And then there was an unfortunate incident at Bank of America where one of the junior investment bankers died, and people have tried to draw a connection between the reason for his death with the workload that he had. We don't know if there can be a direct connection established, but at least that has sparked conversation again. And you're seeing some of the result. The Wall Street Journal was just the latest news outlet to report on this fact that Bloomberg and everyone else has been talking about it for a few months now. Everyone's talking about these rising workloads. There is tension and strain, and banks are being forced to respond. Here you have JP Morgan coming out with sort of fixed, trying to fix some hours for his junior bankers for the first time ever. Bank of America already had that and it's trying to do a better job of enforcement. When you read the fine print though and when they talk about some exceptions, when they talk about, well, except when there are live deals, then you have to sit back and wonder, it's not that people were logging 80-hour weeks and 90-hour weeks and 100-hour weeks just twiddling their thumbs. They were probably doing it when there were live deals. So will this really change anything or will we be having the same conversation two years from now?