Keep those seatbelts fastened people. John Carney says that the London Whale Gone
Rogue narrative laid out by JPMorgan Chase on Friday is already starting to
unravel.
You’ll recall that JPMorgan restated its first-quarter
earnings last week, suggesting that traders in its Chief Investment Office had
basically cooked the books:
Traders in CIO were expected to mark their positions where
they would expect to be able to execute in the market. In this instance, while
the positions were within thresholds established by an independent valuation
control group within CIO, the firm has recently discovered information that
raises questions about the integrity of the trader marks and suggests that
certain individuals may have been seeking to avoid showing the full amount of
the losses in the portfolio during the first quarter. As a result, we are no
longer confident that the trader marks reflected good faith estimates of fair
value at quarter end.
Remarking the trades back to middle-mark reality forced
JPMorgan [JPM 34.96 -0.03
(-0.09%) ] to reduce its
first-quarter net income to $4.92 billion from $5.38 billion, a $459 million
difference. (Dick Bove says the "London Whale" doesn't matter—JPM has
bigger worries.)
Those numbers do not really give a full picture of what
happened. JPMorgan actually says now that the CIO suffered a $600 million loss.
As I reported on CNBC's "Power Lunch" on Friday, the CIO had been
claiming internally that its synthetic credit portfolio had lost just $12
million….
Wait…wait…there’s more at http://www.cnbc.com/id/48198270
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