The staggering $2 billion that JPM acknowledged late yesterday it will lose on an epic trading mistake is not the act of a rogue trader. The losses, which JPM acknowledges will grow to $3 billion and perhaps more as revelations continue, are instead the system-threatening mistake of about a dozen JPM bankers – notwithstanding JPM’s effort to pin the blame on a larger-than-life London trader known as “the whale” for his outsized risk taking.
The bet that went horribly wrong for JPM, which has led the U.S. banking lobby’s noisy opposition to banking reforms post-meltdown, was conceived and botched by a sophisticated, computer-modeled system put in place by CEO Jamie Dimon, a career dealmaker and architect of unwieldy financial conglomerates who has no business running a straightforward bank.
At this writing, investors in J.P. Morgan Chase have lost more than $10 billion in shareholder value as JPM’s stock has plunged a stunning 8 per cent in early trading. More worrisome, in overnight trading elsewhere in the world following Dimon’s disclosure of JPM’s ineptitude, bank stocks globally have abruptly shed tens of billions of dollars in stock market value.
It is a sector that still doesn’t understand it’s playing with fire every time it fails to resist the temptation of a quick buck on, in this case, “synthetic credit products.” That’s a fancy term for a wager on crowd sentiment as it affects a financial instrument the bettor doesn’t actually take possession of and is held fleetingly enough that what it consists of exactly isn’t fully known.
Dimon’s timing, to put it charitably, could not have been more perfectly horrible.
And make no mistake, Dimon, 56, is the architect of this disaster. Dimon is America’s most celebrated banker – at least in banking circles. His sobriquet is the “king of Wall Street,” and U.S. President Barack Obama prematurely declared that “Jamie is my favourite banker.”
Heady with that acclaim and his own considerable self-approval, Dimon constructed a high-risk trading strategy for JPM which we can only hope will not have exploded yesterday with the impact of a cluster bomb, wreaking havoc far and wide. Bloomberg reported in April JPM was amassing risk that might become an exploding cigar.
Dimon, in short, has created an imprudent culture of “eat what you kill” at JPM. It’s a culture more appropriate to an investment bank than a plain-vanilla commercial lender.
This is the Dimon, recall, who attempted to dress down Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of Canada, at a New York bankers’ confab last year only to have his naked self interest exposed as such later the same day in a Gotham speech by Carney on the perils of unfettered cowboy banking. A sheepish Dimon soon apologized to the Canadian central banker, having found scant support for his anti-reform outburst even among his peers.
So what was this bad bet that has understandably thrown a scare into world financial markets today? Did Dimon’s computers and desk jockeys wager on the precise timing of a cure for cancer?
No, they bet that companies with heavy exposure to Europe would benefit from a looming economic turnaround on that continent. Instead, of course, a crisis-wracked Spain, fifth-largest euro economy, became in recent weeks the latest target of speculators driving down the value of sovereign debt, imperiling that country’s finances.
Dimon and JPM placed a bet that a 12th-grader would have possessed the acuity not to make. But, as Groucho Marx observed, there’s never a 12th-grader around when you need one.
JPM’s wager was a computer-modeled one, just like the failed computer modeling by which collateralized debt obligations, “synthetic” derivatives, and other toxic waste was developed as kindling for the Great Recession.
Dimon, who offered a classic non-apology apology yesterday along the lines of “Mistakes were made,” has boundless chutzpah, I’ll give him that. He used the occasion of crisis for his bank – a “self-inflicted wound” at JPM, he allowed – to chastise the pack of pundit jackals, some in Congress, who will no doubt pounce on this dark episode as the evidence it indeed time to impose the so-called Volcker Rule that would separate high-risk proprietary trading to further inflate Dimon’s $27 million pay last year from the conventional commercial banking that keeps the lights on at factories, florists and car dealerships.
Having benefited from the carnage-induced consolidation of the financial industry post-meltdown, JPM, is even more “too big to fail” than in 2008. As such, Dimon is a clear and present danger to the banking system, and should be made to clear out his desk at 270 Park Avenue today.
The recalcitrant CEO yesterday fingered anonymous minions against whom “corrective actions” will be taken. But the fish rots from the head, and no amount of corrective action will be effective while Dimon remains on the premises.
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: David Olive
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