JPMorgan’s Iksil May Spur Regulators to Dissect Trading - Businessweek

Market-moving trades by JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) (JPM)’s chief investment office probably will force regulators to seek more detail on banks’ derivatives positions to help them distinguish risk management from speculation.

Bruno Iksil, a London-based trader in the unit, has built derivatives positions linked to corporate credit that are so big he’s moved markets, according to hedge fund managers and dealers. While Joe Evangelisti, a bank spokesman, said yesterday that the trades are part of the firm’s hedging strategy, four market participants said they resemble proprietary bets, or wagers with the lender’s own money.
Executives at New York-based JPMorgan, the biggest U.S. bank with $2.27 trillion of assets (JPM) at year-end, have opposed the so-called Volcker rule that seeks to prevent banks with federal backing from making speculative trades. Details on Iksil’s positions are too sparse for regulators to determine whether they should be permitted, said Frank Partnoy, a former derivatives trader who’s now a law and finance professor at the University of San Diego.
“This could be an almost completely matched, hedged position, or it could be massively risky, and there’s just no way to tell without getting more complete disclosure,” Partnoy, author of “Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets” said in a phone interview. “I’m surprised that regulators don’t see this example and cry out for more disclosure and more information about these contracts.”

Bank Regulators

Judith Burns, a Securities and Exchange Commission spokeswoman, declined to comment on whether the agency is looking into the trading. Bryan Hubbard, a spokesman with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates banking at JPMorgan, and the Federal Reserve’s Barbara Hagenbaugh also declined to comment.
The three regulators are among those working on the final version of the Volcker rule.
Regulators are stationed in JPMorgan’s offices and are aware of what the bank is doing, said a person familiar with the company’s thinking, who asked not to be identified because he wasn’t authorized to discuss it.
The results of JPMorgan’s chief investment office “are disclosed in our quarterly earnings reports and are fully transparent,” Evangelisti said in a phone interview.
Harvey Pitt, a former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, said yesterday in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “InBusiness With Margaret Brennan” that trading such as Iksil’s should raise regulatory concerns because it’s influencing market prices.

‘Dispel Concerns’

“I’d want to talk with the folks at JPMorgan and understand exactly what took place here,” Pitt said. “And then I would try to get a report out to the public as quickly as possible to dispel concerns about things that may not have occurred and to raise issues about things that actually did occur.”
Arthur Levitt, another former SEC chairman who is a senior adviser to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) (GS), said in a radio interview on “Bloomberg Surveillance” that he expects regulators will require more information on banks’ derivatives positions.
read full article