“When we make mistakes, we take them seriously and often are our own toughest critic,” Dimon said in the remarks ahead of his appearance before the Senate Banking Committee to discuss losses linked to credit derivatives by New York-based JPMorgan’s chief investment office. “While we can never say we won’t make mistakes — in fact, we know we will — we do believe this to be an isolated event.” [Bloomberg]
JPMorgan
BreakingViews has a couple of posts up about one of my favorite things in the financial universe, Credit Suisse’s habit of paying its bankers in structured credit instruments that take pages to describe. How’s that going? Great:
Three years ago, around 2,000 employees were forced to take some $5 billion of the riskiest assets from the Swiss group’s balance sheet as their bonuses. Now, recipients are being offered the chance to buy more. What once seemed like a punishment has turned into something of a perk.
Investors in the “Partner Asset Facility” already sit on a paper profit of around 80 percent, thanks to a recovery in the value of the original portfolio. That gain is essentially safe, since most of the assets involved have been liquidated or sold down and the funds are sitting in low-risk, low-return investments. The snag is that beneficiaries can’t get to the payouts until 2016.
To ease the pain of waiting, Credit Suisse is giving participants another bite. They have a chance to plough some of their paper profits back in, buying up to $1 billion of risky assets, including mortgage securities, from the bank’s books. Over a third of participants opted in to a similar offer late last year. Some of the purchases are to be funded by leverage, leaving perhaps half to come from willing PAF holders.
Phrases like “risky assets, including mortgage securities,” are always a bit of a minefield, but the sense is clear enough, which is that a whole lot of senior people at Credit Suisse are pretty keen to take money that is basically theirs, which is currently held in the form of basically cash, and invest that on a ~2x levered basis in, er, “risky assets, including mortgage securities,” which let’s just stipulate have a higher risk and higher return than cash.
How would you describe those people? Read more »
Volcker Rule Would Have Required JPMorgan Whale To Look Himself In The Mirror And Ask “Is This Really What I Want To Do With My Life?”
By Matt Levine
It looks like London Whale Bruno Iksil is currently vacationing in a quantum state between fired and not-fired, which I suspect is relatively pleasant compared to, like, trading credit indices, and his immediate supervisors have all moved on to bluer oceans. But layers and layers of people above them continue to have to tug at their collars and worry about the whole why-didn’t-we-stop-his-whaling-and-what-does-it-mean-for-our-jobs thing. Jamie Dimon has done a certain amount of that, but today the regulators in charge of JPMorgan got ther chance to do some collar-tugging in front of the Senate. Let’s just assume that was enlightening.
In any case this, from the Fed’s Daniel Tarullo, must be right, right? Read more »
JPMorgan Risk Committee Directors Big On Life Experience, Wall Street Experience Less So
By Bess Levin
The three directors who oversee risk at JPMorgan Chase include a museum head who sat on American International Group Inc.’s governance committee in 2008, the grandson of a billionaire and the chief executive officer of a company that makes flight controls and work boots. What the risk committee of the biggest U.S. lender lacks, and what the five next largest competitors have, are directors who worked at a bank or as financial risk managers. The only member with any Wall Street experience, James Crown, hasn’t been employed in the industry for more than 25 years…The committee, which met seven times last year and hasn’t changed its composition since 2008, approves the bank’s risk- appetite policy and oversees the chief risk officer, according to the company’s April 4 proxy statement. [Bloomberg]
He’s got this. Read more »
The past couple of weeks, some might argue, have been the worst of Jamie Dimon’s professional career. Although being fired by Sandy Weill in 1998 was obviously a distressing time in Dimon’s life, a JPMorgan trader’s multi-billion dollar (and counting) loss appears to be even more painful for the CEO, who now has a reputation (and a title: “America’s Least Hated Banker”) to defend. While it’s unlikely that the blunder will cost him his job, every article written questioning Dimon’s judgment, suggesting that he is in fact fallible, and wondering aloud if he is simply a pretty face (that is about to get the regulation it has vociferously argued against rammed down its throat) clearly hurts. So far, Dimon has chosen to frame the situation, at least publicly, as a group fuck-up, one for which the responsibility is shared among himself, The Whale, The Whale’s bosses, and The Whale’s bosses’ bosses. Over the weekend, though, a heretofore unmentioned character, whose actions set in motion the events that served to tarnish JD’s halo, was added to story. And now, Dimon has a place to channel his anger: on a bloodsucking vermin whose days are numbered. Read more »
Some people are keeping their London-based gigs (for now) and some people are not. Read more »
You can take your said to be leavings and stick them where the sun don’t shine for all Jamie Dimon cares! Read more »
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: Read more »
Time was, Jamie Dimon was the most popular CEO on Wall Street and America’s “Least Hated Banker,” for reasons that included the fact that the man has soulful blue eyes, charisma out the ass, and was in charge of one of the banks that a) didn’t go out of business during the financial crisis, like Lehman and Bear and b) supposedly didn’t actually need the bailout money the government made it take (as JD has said previously), like Bank of America and Citigroup. The man, in the hearts of many and especially the adoring press, could do no wrong. Which is why it probably stung a lot that Lloyd Blankfein, a Wall Street CEO who also possesses more charm than a person would know what do do with, who was also in charge of a bank that neither went out of business during the financial crisis nor required the bailout money it was forced to take (according to GS), and who is also the owner of a pair of baby blues, though in his case ones that sparkle, could only do wrong. And while LB is not one to gloat at another’s misfortune, especially that of a friend, he’s obviously feeling pretty good about being living proof of the old saying, “only one Wall Street CEO’s balls can be in a vise at a time,” and right now it’s JD’s turn. Read more »
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You know what they say: You can’t choose your family, but you can choose your financial planner. Or something like that. One of the great things of being in charge of your money is choosing who (if anyone) will help you manage it. The choice isn’t always an easy one. How will you know that your planner is reputable and trustworthy?
These five red flags may be good indications of whether the financial planner sitting across from you is someone you should trust with your money. LearnVest Planning also provides an innovative 7-step program for your money where you work one-on-one with a financial planner. To see if this program is right for you, start with a free financial consultation.
1. She Isn’t Certified
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SoFi Answers the Call to Refinance Student Loans and Provides Unique Community Benefits
This is a guest post written by SoFi’s CEO, Mike Cagney.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Recently, there’s been a lot of talk amongst leaders in Washington about how to improve the painful process of repaying student loans. At SoFi, we feel your pain and work hard to offer more flexible, more affordable options for our borrowers. One idea that’s getting a lot of attention is increasing the options for refinancing debt after graduation. The only lender currently focused on refinancing private and federal student loans is SoFi.
We recognized early on that borrowers who have made timely payments on their loans, graduated from school, and have a job should be able to refinance their student loans at a lower interest rate. This may be why, after resuming lending by invitation, the media became increasingly interested in what we are doing.
In a recent article posted on MainStreet.com SoFi General Counsel Rob Lavet had this to say about SoFi’s ReFi products: Read more »
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