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$$$ How JPMorgan’s storm in a teapot grew [FT]
$$$ And more on JPM’s likely tranche trades [FTAV]
$$$ ECB stops operations with some Greek banks [Reuters]
$$$ Greeks urged to run poll as euro vote [FT]
$$$ Paulson Pitches AngloGold Ashanti and Caesar’s [DealBook]
$$$ Martin Marietta Falls Most Since 2008 After Einhorn Criticism [Bloomberg]
$$$ 24-Year-Old Finance [sic] Guy Asks All His Dates To Complete A Creepy [sic] Survey Afterward [Deadspin]
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Some people are keeping their London-based gigs (for now) and some people are not. Continue reading »
It’s sort of easy these days to worry about banks. Banks do worrying things, etc. Bankers are only human and sometimes they get things wrong. Arguably those errors are systematically biased in favor of risk, what with the bankers being incentivized by asymmetric incentives and so forth.
One thing that could help you sleep at night is that other people are keeping a close eye on banks. Other people like their regulators. And like Moody’s and S&P and Fitch. Also other people like, I don’t know, David Tepper or something, but a thing to like about regulators and rating agencies specifically is that they have inside information. If you believe, as many do, that big banks are far too opaque for you to have any hope of evaluating them based on public disclosures, then the confidence of other public-market debt and equity investors – however smart and motivated by, y’know, the prospect of making money they might be – should only give you so much comfort: they’re relying on the same opaque financials as you are. Regulators, on the other hand, can see literally whatever they want about a bank’s book, and rating agencies can and do (sometimes) get lots of nonpublic information from the banks in formulating their ratings judgments. If the Fed and the OCC think a bank is sound, and Moody’s and S&P think it is investment grade, who are you to worry about its creditworthiness? Don’t answer that.
Anyway this is weird: Continue reading »
Einhorn says he has a lot of stocks to talk about, starts with Martin Marietta Materials, which he says has “lots of problems.” Einhorn calls MLM CEO a “degree in megalomania”…Einhorn just pulled out a magic wand and I’m pretty sure made a Harry Potter reference. And he’s onto talking global economies. He’s talking up a stock in Norway known as GJF. [Deal Journal]
You can take your said to be leavings and stick them where the sun don’t shine for all Jamie Dimon cares! Continue reading »
[via NJD]
This is sort of a strange footnote to the London Whale: one of the hedge funds that made money feasting off his carcass was run by JPMorgan*:
Even as a trader for JPMorgan in London was selling piles of insurance on corporate debt, figuring that the economy was on the upswing, a mutual fund elsewhere at the bank was taking the other side of the bet. …
But perhaps one of the most surprising takers of the JPMorgan trade was a mutual fund run out of a completely different part of the bank. The bank’s Strategic Income Opportunities Fund, which holds about $13 billion in client money, owns about $380 million worth of insurance identical to the kind the “London whale” was selling, according to regulatory filings and people with knowledge of the trade. It is unclear how much the fund made.
This is … not surprising. Some people want to sell CDS, some people want to buy it. That’s how there’s a market. And when you’re as big and interconnected as JPMorgan, it’s not surprising that the market often crosses between bits of yourself. That is, it’s sort of silly to think of JPMorgan as a market participant; it is rather a nexus of many many market participants. Some of those participants are “JPMorgan,” in that they’re interested in the performance of JPMorgan as an entity; others of them are “clients” in the sense that they are buying securities from JPMorgan or having their assets managed by JPMorgan in some separate or mutual-fundy way; but to think of them all as JPMorgan is silly.
But the conclusions from this unremarkable fact are sort of interesting: Continue reading »
If it feels like it’s been forever since we last heard from Eliot Spitzer’s former gal-pal Ashley Dupré it’s because it has. What’s she been up to since July 2010, when she told reporters she was focusing on getting her real estate license and writing a dating column which sadly did not continue past its debut? Becoming a small business owner and shedding her old skin, which she’d appreciate if you didn’t bring up in conversation. That (hooking for $2,000/hr) was then, this (being a New Jersey-based entrepreneur) is now. And while the new venture “represents a continuation of her evolution,” rest assured “special underthings” and swimsuits will always have a place in her life. Continue reading »
