I feel like this exchange did not go well for Jamie Dimon:

[Elliott Capital's Paul] Singer said the unfathomable nature of banks’ public accounts made it impossible to know which were “actually risky or sound”. … Mr Singer noted that derivatives positions, in particular, were difficult for outside investors to parse and worried that banks did not always collateralise their positions. Mr Dimon said the bank did for all “major” clients. Mr Singer retorted: “Well, we’re a minor client then.”

Whoops! Guess someone else doesn’t know what positions banks collateralize. I suspect someone at Elliott is already on the phone with JPMorgan to renegotiate their CSA. Also so many other people; I count about $50 billion of uncollateralized (fair value) derivative exposure at JPMorgan, suggesting that it fully collateralizes a little under two-thirds of its trades.¹ Perhaps those are the two-thirds with the major clients, but if so that seems a little irrelevant. That’s a lot of minor-client money.

Why does Singer care? Well I guess he wants better collateral terms from JPMorgan? More seriously … there is whatever incentive to say things that always exists at Davos sessions, which I guess is a thing, ugh.² Then there is the broad question of whether banks are too opaque to invest in. Singer is not alone in thinking that the answer is no; we talked a while back about how a lot of smart people get kind of freaked out by bank financial statements; derivatives, as well as other buzzwords like prop trading and opacity, play a role in their conclusions as well. Also here is a funny article about how 60% of Bloomberg subscribers are basically commie anarchists: Read more »