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JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon has shocked Wall Street by disclosing the bank racked up $2bn (£1.2bn) of trading losses in the past six weeks and warned they could get worse. “It puts egg on our face and we deserve any criticism we get,” Mr Dimon told analysts in a hastily arranged call after stock markets closed in New York on Thursday night. America’s second-biggest bank said that the losses stemmed from a series of complex trades that were designed to hedge the bank's overall risk. Some of the losses have been offet by gains of about $1bn from...

One may be forgiven to believe that via its FX liquidity swap lines the Fed only bailed out foreign Central Banks, which in turn took the money and funded their own banks. It turns out that is only half the story: we now know the Fed also acted in a secondary bail out capacity, providing over $350 billion in short term funding exclusively to 35 foreign banks, of which the biggest beneficiaries were UBS, Dexia and BNP. Since the funding provided was in the form of ultra-short maturity commercial paper it was essentially equivalent to cash funding. In other words,...

HARRY Markopolos -- the whistleblower on Bernie Madoff who proved to be much smarter than the SEC -- says there are evildoers out there who will make the Ponzi scum "look like small-time." Markopolos gave a speech to 400 of the faithful at the Greek Orthodox Church in Southampton and predicted major scandals will soon be revealed about the unregulated, $600 trillion, credit-default swap market.

SO maybe Eliot Spitzer did kill AIG, after all. Nobody doubts the in surance giant is basically kaput, or that the promix ate cause is billions in losses in obscure instruments known as credit-default swaps, or CDSs. But American International Group didn't go deadly deep into CDSs until after New York Attorney General Spitzer had forced out Maurice "Hank" Greenberg out as CEO. GO back to March 2005, just days after Spitzer scored his biggest scalp during his eight-year tenure as the Sheriff of Wall Street by compelling Greenberg's departure. The new CEO, long-time AIG executive Martin Sullivan, held an...

Describing events in the bond market in 2008—and their future implications—is a bit like describing the construction of a house of cards. It helps to understand the structural differences between trading stocks and trading bonds. Stocks trade on electronic or bricks-and-mortar exchanges where buyers and sellers converge in a central meeting place and transact with anonymity. Bonds trade on an over-the-counter market using an intermediary, such as a bank or broker with full knowledge of the trade counterparty. It’s similar to trading in your car with a car dealer, which then looks for a buyer. The dealer is taking a...

SO maybe Eliot Spitzer did kill AIG, after all. Nobody doubts the in surance giant is basically kaput, or that the promix ate cause is billions in losses in obscure instruments known as credit-default swaps, or CDSs. But American International Group didn't go deadly deep into CDSs until after New York Attorney General Spitzer had forced out Maurice "Hank" Greenberg out as CEO. GO back to March 2005, just days after Spitzer scored his biggest scalp during his eight-year tenure as the Sheriff of Wall Street by compelling Greenberg's departure. The new CEO, long-time AIG executive Martin Sullivan, held an...

CDS blamed for role in bankruptcy filings By Henny Sender in New York Published: April 17 2009 00:57 | Last updated: April 17 2009 00:57 Credit default swaps, the derivatives instruments that have figured prominently in the global financial crisis, are now being blamed for playing a role in two bankruptcy filings this week. Bankers and lawyers involved in restructuring efforts say they are concerned some lenders to troubled companies, such as newsprint producer AbitibiBowater and mall owner General Growth Properties, stand to benefit from a default because they also hold default swaps, which entitle them to payments in such...

So is that it? Is the downturn over? After bouncing off of 6500, or more than half its peak value, and with Citigroup briefly breaking $1, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has rallied back more than 1200 points. So, is it safe to go back in the water? Best to figure out what went wrong first -- what I like to call a bear-raid extraordinaire.The Dow clearly got a boost from Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's new and improved plan, announced on Monday, to rid our banks of those nasty toxic assets. The idea is to form a "Public-Private Investment Fund"...

Feds, Brits Probe AIG's London Office on $500B Losses Ground zero for AIG's spectacular implosion, which has soaked up more federal bailout money than any other entity, appears to have been a small London branch office that may have lost nearly half a trillion dollars in bad deals. The disastrous deals were built up in a decade and, when the crisis hit, the man who ran the unit for the last eight years retired after making $280 million for himself and leaving with a $1 million-a-month consulting contract. The struggling New York-based insurance giant has avoided collapse with the massive...

Credit-default-swap traders may need a shorter leash. LIQUIDATION. A GOOD SOAKING. PLENTY OF TEARS. It is real wet out there in the markets. Given all the known big-picture reasons for this drenching, does it makes sense to continue enabling the folks who make and sell umbrellas to force it to rain at will? The people with a stake in umbrella prices who are able to trigger a downpour are the traders who bid up credit-default swaps on individual companies, whether they own their debt or not, and short the stock. In combination, these actions feed signals into the market that...

In the long run, when we are all dead, historians will be debating the root causes behind the global financial meltdown of 2008. They will join up multiple dots, just as they did after the September 11 terror attacks. Among the precipitating factors, toxic mortgage debt securities grossly inflated banks’ balance sheets and investors’ portfolios. Credit rating agencies blessed those assets’ illusory values. Real estate tumbled in a vicious downward spiral, while steep oil prices helped reverse the business cycle. Inadequate regulation, in America and elsewhere, clearly exacerbated all the other drivers. Specifically, when regulators permitted major American investment banks...

Any honest assessment must include the role that credit-default swaps have played in this mess: it’s the elephant in the room, the $30 trillion market that people do not want to talk about. C.D.S.’s have already figured prominently in taxpayer bailouts. The $150 billion rescue of the American International Group, for example, came about because of swaps the insurer had written on mortgage securities. And the $100 billion taxpayer backstop handed to Bank of America on Jan. 16 had a good bit to do with soured credit-default swaps that the bank inherited when it acquired Merrill Lynch. “Credit-default swaps written...

In the past, whenever the financial system came close to a breakdown, the authorities rode to the rescue and prevented it from going over the brink. That is what I expected in 2008 but that is not what happened. On Monday September 15, Lehman Brothers, the US investment bank, was allowed to go into bankruptcy without proper preparation. It was a game-changing event with catastrophic consequences. For a start, the price of credit default swaps, a form of insurance against companies defaulting on debt, went through the roof as investors took cover. AIG, the insurance giant, was carrying a large...

European credit indices began on a weaker note on Wednesday morning - the day after US president Barack Obama’s inauguration - as fears of a worldwide recession mount. The new president’s inauguration speech yesterday did little to sooth nerves – the cost of buying credit protection for US government debt edged higher to 73.5bp this morning, compared to 71.8bp at the New York close, according to CMA. Last night’s announcement that the Bank of England will start buying billions of pounds in high quality corporate bonds to kickstart the economy has market participants pondering if such a move could be...

Barack Obama's White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, told business leaders assembled by the Wall Street Journal in November that the economic crisis facing the country is "an opportunity to do things you could not do before." That has to be one of the most chilling statements I have ever heard uttered by an American political official in my lifetime. It ranks right up there with the transparent arrogance of Clinton administration hotshot Paul Begala's July 1998 explanation of the use of executive orders by the president to go over the heads of Congress: "Stroke of the pen. Law...

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As much as $75 billion of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. value was destroyed by the unplanned and chaotic form of the firm's bankruptcy filing in September, according to an internal analysis by the company's restructuring advisers. A less-hurried Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing likely would have preserved tens of billions of dollars of value, according to a three-month study by the advisory firm, Alvarez & Marsal. An orderly filing would have enabled Lehman to sell some assets outside of federal bankruptcy-court protection, and would have given it time to try to unwind its derivatives portfolio in a way that might have...

<p>Forget Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion fraud. The SEC, and the press, should be focused on short-sellers’ attempts to destroy the U.S. banking system, Cramer said.</p> <p>Just in the 12 days leading up to the Nov. 24 Citigroup bailout, short selling accounted for over 49% of the total trading volume in that company’s stock. For JPMorgan Chase , it was 41%. Bank of America : 35%. Goldman Sachs : 40%. Morgan Stanley : 37%. Wachovia : 42%. Wells Fargo : 42%.</p>

Federal Reserve Board data show that: _ More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions. _ Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year. _ Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics.

Abstract: Five of the world's richest hedge fund managers, including George Soros, the man who the broke the Bank of England, have been called to account by US politicians for their role in the collapse of the global financial system. The quintet – including John Paulson, who made $3.7bn (£2.49bn) last year betting against the US mortgage market – were grilled over their roles in buying unregulated derivatives products, which some politicians believe contributed to the financial markets' meltdown. The men, who each earned more than $1bn each last year, were called to account by Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman, who...