JPMorgan Chase announced a $2 billion loss from trading financial derivatives in its Chief Investment Office in London. The losses occurred when traders placed large bets on credit default swap indexes to hedge previous positions, but the new bets introduced unaccounted risks and backfired. Regulators are investigating the trades and their implications for financial reform regulations around banks' trading and hedging activities. The losses also renewed debates around how much risk big banks should take.

1. JP MORGAN FINANCIAL LOSS
• KISHORE KUMAR.C (09MIB026).
• Manojh(11MBA0048).
• Noor Md.(11MBA0084)

2. Introduction…
J.P. Morgan is a leader in financial services, offering solutions
to clients in more than 100 countries with one of the most
comprehensive global product platforms available. It has been
helping clients to do business and manage their wealth for
more than 200 years. The business has been built upon our
core principle of putting our clients’ interests first.
J.P. Morgan is part of JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM), a
global financial services firm with assets of $2.3 trillion.

3. Business…
J.P. Morgan is a leader in asset management, investment
banking, private banking, treasury and securities services, and
commercial banking. Today, the firm serves one of the largest
client franchises in the world, including corporations,
institutional investors, hedge funds, governments, healthcare
organizations, educational institutions and affluent individuals in
more than 100 countries.
J.P. Morgan’s core businesses include:
Asset Management Investment Bank
Private Banking Securities Services
Treasury Services Commercial Banking

4. Trading Loss….
Trading losses that risk eroding firms’ capital in its entirely are
more important—to the institution, to other market participants,
and (in the case of banks) to the federal deposit insurance fund—
than bigger losses at larger or better-capitalized firms. Other
things being equal, a better-capitalized institution is more able to
sustain trading losses and is thus less likely to fail and present
costs to counterparties, to the taxpayer, and (in the case of
systemically important institutions) to the financial system in
general and perhaps to the economy as a whole.

7. JPMorgan Chase, suffered losses of less than 10 percent of equity.
JPMorgan Chase lost 0.3 percent of total assets, 4 percent of net
equity, and 4.8 percent of tier one capital. Its losses, while vast, were
not large enough relative to its equity cushion and capitalization to
present a solvency problem and did not compel the bank to raise
additional capital.
Controller of the Currency told the House Financial Services
Committee, "the loss by [JPMorgan] affects its earnings, but does
not present a solvency issue. [JPMorgan], like other large banks,
It has improved its capital, reserves, and liquidity since the financial
crisis, and its levels are sufficient to absorb this loss."

9. On May 10, 2012, JP Morgan disclosed that it had lost more than
$2 billion by trading financial derivatives. Jamie Dimon, CEO and
chairman of JP Morgan, reported that the bank’s Chief Investment
Office (CIO) executed the trades to hedge the firm’s overall credit
exposure as part of the bank’s asset liability management program
(ALM). The CIO operated within the depository subsidiary of JP
Morgan, although its offices were in London. The funding for the
trades came from what JP Morgan characterized as excess deposits,
which are the difference between deposits held by the bank and its
commercial loans.

10. The trading losses resulted from an attempt to unwind a previous hedge
investment, although the precise details remain unconfirmed. The losses
occurred in part because the CIO chose to place a new counter-hedge
position, rather than simply unwind the original position.
In 2007 and 2008, JP Morgan had bought an index tied to credit default
swaps on a broad index of high-grade corporate bonds. In general, this
index would tend to protect JP Morgan if general economic conditions
worsened (or systemic risk increased) because the perceived health of high-
grade firms would tend to deteriorate with the economy. In 2011, the CIO
decided to change the firm’s position by implementing a new counter
trade. Because this new trade was not identical to the earlier trades, it
introduced basis risk and market risk, among other potential problems. It is
this second “hedge on a hedge” that is responsible for the losses in 2012.

11. Several financial regulators are responsible for overseeing elements
of the JP Morgan trading losses. The Office of the Controller of the
Currency (OCC) is the primary prudential regulator of federally
chartered depository banks and their ALM activities, including the CIO
of JP Morgan, even though it is located in London. The Federal Reserve
is the prudential regulator of JP Morgan’s holding company, although
it would tend to defer to the primary prudential regulators of the
firm’s subsidiaries for significant regulation of those entities. The
Federal Reserve also regulates systemic risk aspects of large financial
firms such as JP Morgan.

12. The CIO must fulfill with Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
(FDIC) regulations because it is part of the insured depository.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) oversees JP Morgan’s
required disclosures to the firm’s stockholders regarding material
risks and losses such as the trades.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) regulates
trading in swaps and financial derivatives. The heads of these
agencies coordinate through the Financial Stability Oversight Council
(FSOC), which is chaired by the Secretary of Treasury.

13. The trading losses may have implications for a number of financial
regulatory issues. For example, should the exemption to the Volcker
Rule for hedging be interpreted broadly enough to encompass
general portfolio hedges like the JP Morgan trades, or should hedging
be limited to more specific risks?
Are current regulations of large financial firms the appropriate
balance to address perceptions that some firms are too-big-to-fail?

14. The trading losses raise concerns about the calculation and
reporting of risk by large financial firms.
JP Morgan changed its value at risk (VaR) model during the time of
the trading losses. Some are concerned that VaR models may not
adequately address potential risks. Some are concerned that the
change in reporting of the VaR at JP Morgan’s CIO may not have
provided adequate disclosures of the potential risks that JP Morgan
faced. Such disclosures are governed by securities laws.

15. The $2 billion trading loss that JPMorgan Chase announced in a
hastily scheduled conference call on May 10 has its roots in credit-
default swaps, the same derivatives that helped trigger the financial
crisis—only this time there were no mortgages involved.
The bank has launched an internal investigation, regulators are
swarming, and the Department of Justice has said it is pursuing a
criminal probe. The bank has not yet released details of the money-
losing trades. But based on publicly available information plus
interviews with traders, former JPMorgan employees, and fund
managers, it’s possible to draw the basic outlines of what may have
gone wrong.

16. The mistakes were made in the bank’s Chief Investment Office, run by
Ina Drew, who left the company on May 14. The office is in charge of
managing excess cash and some of its investments. In the past five
years, Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon has transformed the
operation, increasing the size and risk of its speculative
bets, according to five former executives with direct knowledge of the
changes, Bloomberg News reported in April. The mandate was to
generate profits, a shift from the office’s mission of protecting
JPMorgan from risks inherent in its banking business, such as interest-
rate and currency fluctuations. A spokesman for the bank declined to
comment.

17. Credit-default swaps are insurance-like contracts between two
parties. The buyer makes regular payments to the seller, who must
make the buyer whole if an insured bond defaults.
In addition to buying credit-default swaps on a particular bond,
investors can buy swaps on indexes of bonds, such as the ones
created by Markit Group, a deriviatives firm.
The indexes rise when economic conditions worsen and the likelihood
of corporate bond defaults increases. Traders use them to speculate
on changing credit conditions. Buying the index can be a way for
someone who owns a lot of corporate bonds to hedge against a
decline in their value.

18. In 2011, JPMorgan profited by betting that credit conditions would
worsen. In December, though, the European Central Bank provided
long-term loans to euro zone banks, igniting a bond rally.
Suddenly, JPMorgan’s bearish bets were vulnerable. Early this
year, London-based traders in JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office
made offsetting bullish bets, according to market participants. It sold
credit insurance using a Markit CDX North America Investment Grade
Index that reflects the price of credit-default swaps on 121
companies that had investment-grade ratings when the index was
created in 2007. The bank is thought to have sold insurance on the
index using contracts that expire in 2017.

19. To protect against short-term losses, it also bought insurance on the
index using contracts that expire at the end of 2012. That could have
been a profitable strategy, because the 2017 insurance was more
expensive than the 2012. And as long as the spread between the
prices of the two contracts remained relatively stable, any decline in
the value of one would be offset by an increase in the other, reducing
the bank’s risk of an overall loss on the position.
JPMorgan bought and sold so many contracts on the Markit CDX that
it may have driven price moves in the $10 trillion market for credit
swaps indexes tied to corporate health, according to market
participants. At one point the cost of insurance via the index fell
20 percent below the average cost of insuring the individual bonds
that composed the index. “The strategy overall got too big,” says
Peter Tchir, a former credit derivatives trader who now heads TF
Market Advisors, a New York trading firm. “Once their activity was
moving the market, they should have stopped and got out.”

20. Sensing an opportunity, some hedge funds bought the 2017
contracts and sold credit insurance on the underlying
bonds, hoping to profit when the relationship between the prices
returned to normal. But because JPMorgan continued to be a big
seller of insurance, the prices got even more out of whack, giving
the hedge funds a paper loss. That led some traders to complain
about the situation to the press. On April 5, Bloomberg News
published a story saying that Bruno Iksil, a London-based trader for
JPMorgan, had amassed a position so large that he may have been
driving price moves in the credit derivatives market. The
information was attributed to five traders at hedge funds and rival
banks who requested anonymity because they were not
authorized to discuss the transactions. Iksil’s influence on the
market spurred some counterparts to dub him the London Whale.

21. Once the news got out, things quickly went south for JPMorgan.
Hedge funds increased their bets that prices would come back in line.
Thanks to their trades plus deteriorating credit conditions, the prices
of the 2017 index contracts rose more than the prices of the 2012
contracts. JPMorgan’s paper losses mounted.
Compounding the losses were the sheer size of the bets, which made
it difficult for the bank to unwind its trades. “These had to be
massive positions” to inflict the loss JPMorgan suffered, says Michael
Livian, CEO of Manhattan asset manager Livian & Co. and a former
credit derivatives specialist at Bear Stearns. “And when you build that
kind of size in the credit derivative market, you have to know you
can’t just exit the position overnight.”

22. On the May 10 conference call, Dimon confessed: “The portfolio has
proven to be riskier, more volatile, and less effective as an economic
hedge than we thought.” For JPMorgan, the nation’s largest bank,
the stakes are far bigger than a $2 billion paper loss. Since the bank
announced its loss, investors have driven the stock down
13 percent, knocking $20 billion off the company’s market value as
of May 16.
The episode has reignited the debate over how much freedom
banks should have to make bets. Dimon had been a vociferous
opponent of the Volcker Rule, a section of the Dodd-Frank financial
reform law that would greatly limit the kinds of risks banks can take.
Now, as Dimon himself pointed out, the proponents of the rule can
point to JPMorgan to support their case. “This is a very unfortunate
and inopportune time to have had this kind of mistake, yeah,” he
said in an appearance on NBC’sMeet the Press.

23. The loss also raises the question of why the bank was putting
shareholders at risk to gamble in a market of hidden indexes, where
specialized hedge funds seek to profit from pricing anomalies.
“JPMorgan was definitely in the very dark gray area between
insurance and speculation,” says Robert Lamb, a finance professor at
New York University who has studied risk on Wall Street. “To be the
one side of the market and to think you were immune from the
crowd on the other side is not safe, sane, or reasonable.”