Bank Losses Sharpen Focus on Proprietary Trading*

On 10 May 2012, JP Morgan, the largest US bank by assets, announced that poorly designed and executed hedging strategies had caused more than $2 billion in derivatives trading losses from transactions in London. Even more worrying is the fact that some regulators, including the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the US Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), have argued that since they do not yet monitor JP Morgan as a swap dealer, they became aware of the trading losses after JP Morgan’s announcement despite earlier media reports at the beginning of April that raised red flags over the London Whale’s $100 billion notional exposure in one credit index. Even the regulators, the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and Federal Reserve Bank, failed to detect the risk posed by the massive hedging strategy, despite having more than 100 of their own staff embedded at JP Morgan, up until April, around the same time that Bloomberg and Wall Street news reports suggested that the UK-based trader at the bank was playing a dominant role in certain markets and distorting prices.

Volcker Rule: Grounds for Divorce?*

In a narrow 3-2 vote on 11 January 2012, CFTC Commissioners proposed their own version of the Volcker Rule, which prohibits proprietary trading activities of banks and limits their investments in private-equity and hedge funds in line with the restrictions already proposed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Federal Reserve, the SEC and the Comptroller of the Currency in October, 2011. The intent of the Volcker Rule is to reduce risk in the US banking system by limiting the excessive risk-taking activities of banking entities, defined as any insured depository institutions and their subsidiaries.