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Every bank I have worked for has a policy on employee gambling. It is policed, but it doesn't need to be policed noisily off trading floors because the sort of person who is at risk for problem gambling doesn't make a good banker. On trading floors it is mostly self-policed because all traders are gamblers, but all traders also know that a problem gambler is a shitty trader. Banks are also all over their senior employees' (and their wives') personal finances - they aren't explicitly looking for consumer debt problems, but I suspect they would notice.
Boards of Directors (as a matter of corporate law) and the CEOs they delegate to get a lot of discretion in how to be long-term greedy - the legal term is the Business Judgement Rule. If Fuld and the Board thought that creating a culture where the execs and their wives were part of a Lehman "family" (which he did - that Fuld ran retreats for execs' wives attracted a lot of bemused coverage after the bankruptcy) was the best way to align incentives at the top of a bank, they were absolutely allowed to do that. And part of that culture is prohibiting affairs.
Your just-so story sounds entirely plausible and a Silicon Valley startup which regularly needs to break laws or act immorally would probably do well to preferentially hire rakes, with Uber being the proof of concept. A bank is a different type of organisation and needs to have a more small-c conservative corporate culture.
On the merits, execs having mistresses creates conflicts of interest (particularly if the mistress is employed by the bank or a client) and avoidable complexity. I understand why banks would want to discourage it. Managing conflicts of interest is part of the core competency of a bank (for both client trust and regulatory reasons) and the simplest way to manage them is to avoid the ones that don't come with a profit opportunity. Allegedly (I am not senior enough for this to be visible at my level) banks don't like exec spouses having careers that could create the impression of a conflict of interest, and mistresses are more trouble for multiple reasons.
Personally, I favour the mafia rule for mid-to-senior employees of high-trust organisations - you can shag your wife or a whore, but shagging respectable women you are not married to is verboten.
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