JP Morgan & Co.’s chairman and chief executive officer, James Dimon, renewed his apologies to shareholders for last year’s multibillion-dollar trading fiasco, and an investor that has pushed for corporate-governance changes at large financial firms said it would focus this proxy season on changing the bank’s board…The 57-year-old Mr. Dimon called the “London Whale” trading losses, which cost the company more than $6 billion and led to the departure of a top aide to the CEO, “a real kick in the teeth” and “the stupidest and most embarrassing situation I have ever been a part of.” Five pages of Mr. Dimon’s 30-page annual letter to shareholders, released Wednesday, outlined “lessons learned” from the incident, which damaged Mr. Dimon’s standing as the best risk manager on Wall Street. [WSJ]
apologies
Barclays Is ‘Truly Sorry’ It Got Caught Manipulating Libor Though Not Sorry Enough To Make Amends In Person
By Bess Levin
An ad in the paper will have to suffice. Read more »
They’ve reviewed the tapes and it appears an apology is in order. Read more »
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Hedge Funds
Yahoo! RésuméGate, Day 7: Third Point Is Not Enjoying This At All
By Bess Levin
In fact, hand to god, Dan Loeb and Co. find this “embarrassing episode” that they set the wheels in motion for painful to watch. Read more »
Earlier today, Forbes writer Jeff Bercovici reported that last night at the Time magazine Person of the Year debate, restaurateur Mario Batali likened the banking industry to “Stalin or Hitler,” Joe and Adolf, respectively. The collective members of the banking industry did not take this well. They banned expensed lunches at all of Batali’s eateries, took to Bloomberg’s restaurant review pages to express their outrage and vowed not to line his pockets with another dime, while also taking shots at Mario’s signature and beloved orange Crocs. Moments ago, Batali choose to take to the airwaves with a response to the backlash. While he would have received credit for kicking things up a notch with an ice cold “You won’t be missed” or “Apologies…for failing to mention another luminary you remind me of, the late, great Benito Mussolini,” he choose to go with this: Read more »
UBS trader Kweku Adoboli, accused over the Swiss banking giant’s $2.3 billion losses from unauthorized trades, was “sorry beyond words,” his attorney said Thursday. [NYP]
ironically fake john paulson buys real trees
With half of Europe having banned short-selling and anything that might loosely resemble it, if you think that French banks are undercapitalized then you may be seeking less traditional ways to monetize that view. One approach that you might have considered is writing a fictional account of a near-future Eurozone meltdown with real names of banks and individuals and selling it pseudonymously to a major French newspaper to publish in a twelve-part serial. If you live in the U.S. that may not sound like such a great idea, since we don’t consume a lot of based-loosely-on-real-events financial fiction unless it stars Shia LeBoeuf.
But in France, where after all mime is considered a form of entertainment, there seems to be a big appetite for fictionalized financial markets, as Le Monde found out when they puplished “Terminus pour l’euro” this summer. But Le Monde’s success may just have ruined it for the rest of you:
Read more »
“I had no intent to injury or bodily harm anybody,” Vincent McCrudden told a judge today after pleading guilty to emailing a bunch of regulators describing them as “fucking corrupt piece[s] of shit!” letting them know that they were “not getting away with this,” encouraging them to “laugh mother fucker laugh,” and making it clear that “it wasn’t ever a question of ‘if’ I was going to kill you, it was just of when.” McCrudden, who also had an “execution” list on his website and encouraged people to help him cross the 47 names off the list, added that he “apologized” and was sorry for “any apprehension [the threats] may have caused” his targets and their families. Having said that, McC noted that he’d been “upset” about a suit against him by the CFTC and never actually “intended to injury or bodily harm anybody. [BW, earlier]
Last month it was reported that in 2007, executives with Munich Re subsidiary Ergo Versicherungsgruppe came up with the idea to throw a party for top performing sales executives at a bathhouse, featuring a bunch of prostitutes for their consumption. Because such events have the potential to devolve into mass chaos, with buyers and sellers running amok and no one knowing who’s down for what, the Germans had the bright idea to keep order via color-coding. Each hooker would wear an armband, with yellow indicating “available for sexual favors,” red indicating that she was a hostess and white indicating that she was “reserved for executives and top agents.” Additionally, the girls also received a “stamp” following each visit to one of the curtained canopied beds, so party-goers could know how many times she’d been “frequented.” When the story came out, a spokesman for the company said in a statement that incentive trips for successful salespeople “definitely don’t usually proceed the way it’s described.” Since then, current and former employees have countered that that’s actually exactly how they usually proceed and were going to keep proceeding, until Ergo ruined everyone’s good time by banning them indefinitely. On top of that, the company has now gone and taken out a full-page ad that includes an apology for the “mistakes” made by both the firm and the participants. Read more »
Seriously, won’t happen again. Read more »
“During my tenure I abused the position of trust I enjoyed,” said Charles Antonucci, who admitted to accepting ‘what amounted to bribes from clients and faking a $6.5 million investment into the bank,’ and used the money to fund, among other things, trips to the Superbowl. “Sometimes I did it to enrich myself, other times in a misguided attempt to keep the bank healthy.” [WSJ]
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