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’A very messy Ambac lawsuit for JPMorgan
JPMorgan didn’t want this to be made public. You can kind of see why.
Quick background — the bank has been engaged in a legal battle with Ambac since November 2008. The monoline says EMC, Bear Stearns old mortgage-banking arm,
Snap news
Breaking pre-market news on Friday,
- Espírito Santo Financial terminates its contract with Fitch — statement.
- National Grid to review details of disappointing Niagara Mohawk rate case — statement.
Loan loss reservations, US bank earnings
Did you think US banks’ 2010 results would actually mean something?
Silly you. Don’t you know their earnings — like those from 2009 — will be skewed by falling loan loss provisions set aside to cover bad debt.
China’s bonded-warehouse copper mystery
Copper prices in London soared to record highs on Tuesday as data from China showed the country’s imports had picked up for the first time in three months — just as fears over supply disruptions in the world’s biggest producer,
Madoff is “too good to be true” – JP Morgan, October 2008
Bernie Madoff. Colombian Interests. Threats to lives. Oh my.
This time two years ago the world’s largest ponzi scheme had just come to light. Some 24 months on and the legal-wrangling between Madoff’s investors and related parties continues.
The Spitzer settlement for mortgages
Cast your minds back to early 2003.
Wall Street was still at war with the pre-Dupré, New York state attorney general Eliot Spitzer — a man hellbent on exposing financials’ conflicts of interest. On April 28 of that year,
ProPublica: SEC investigating JPM and Magnetar
Just a quick post alerting readers to the latest from ProPublica’s Jesse Eisenger and Jake Bernstein — the gist of which will sound awfully familiar to those who followed the Abacus case:
The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether JPMorgan Chase allowed a hedge fund to improperly select assets for a $1.1 billion deal backed by subprime mortgages,
Deutsche Bank on the perfect mortgage company
Foreclosure fraud! Robosigning! Repurchases!
How, as Mike Konczal noted a couple weeks ago, did mortgage servicers get it so wrong?
To answer the question it’s worth taking a look at a certain mortgage firm that may have got it right.
Why JP Morgan’s new copper ETF may have a scouse exposure
JP Morgan threw its name into the physically backed commodity ETF race on Monday with the filing of a preliminary prospectus for a copper-backed product.
The SEC document, the first from a major new player preparing anticipating an entry into the market,
Banking on Brics
Bank earnings season is now underway, and here’s a trio of charts from the Economist Intelligence Unit showing that most of the banks whose shares outperformed the Bloomberg World Banks Index in the past year are in the Brics.
JP Morgan Q3 EPS beats expectations at $1.01
JP Morgan kicked off the third-quarter bank earnings season on Wednesday with a better-than-expected set of results.
Earnings per share came in at $1.01 versus a market consensus of $0.90, largely down to lower loan losses in its retail and credit card units.
Gaming Volcker, ongoing
It can get confusing to keep up with how the banks are responding to the Volcker Rule, especially as some stories repeat themselves and others change.
In the case of JP Morgan, we learned in August from the Washington Post that “more than 100 project teams are hard at work trying to anticipate the implications of the new rules and to adjust the firm’s businesses accordingly.”
About that Ocado short squeeze
Er, is that it?
Anyone expecting Tuesday’s trading statement from Ocado – its first as a listed company – to trigger a big short squeeze is going to be disappointed.
In fact, all we have learnt is that the high-profile flotation did not boost sales.
Another prop desk folds, this time at Goldman
Bloomberg is reporting that Goldman Sachs is disbanding its Principal Strategies prop trading unit:
*GOLDMAN SACHS SAID TO BE DISBANDING PRINCIPAL STRATEGIES UNIT
*GOLDMAN PRINCIPAL STRATEGIES HEAD
JP Morgan Securities Inc. no longer exists
Blink and you would’ve missed it, but JP Morgan Securities has just changed its legal status, and name.
From the Federal Reserve’s primary dealers update:
The Limited Liability Company label comes with oodles of benefits,
Two years and a Volcker Rule later
It seems JP Morgan is closing all proprietary trading desks, according to Bloomberg, starting with its commodities unit. Equities and fixed income desks will come later.
From the report:
Closing the prop trading desk for commodities affects fewer than 20 traders,
Promethean (World) Unbound
Ocado has competition.
Not from Tesco or one of the other big supermarkets groups, but a maker of interactive whiteboards called Promethean World, which is now a genuine contender for the worst UK IPO of 2010.
Banks’ buyback pain to be $17bn – $42bn, Fitch estimates
While the Firm uses the best information available to it in estimating its repurchase liability, the estimation process is inherently uncertain and requires the application of judgment.
- JP Morgan’s Q2 10-Q filing.
JP Morgan says earnings per share $1.09 in Q2
JP Morgan reported second-quarter EPS around 40¢ above market expectations on Thursday at $1.09 — although ex-exceptional brought this down to $87.
Flashes, via Reuters:
RTRS-JPMORGANCHASE REPORTS SECOND-QUARTER 2010 NET INCOME OF $4.8BILLION,
Webvan 2.0
What is Ocado’s secret sauce?
Several big, established and profitable companies (Merlin and New Look for example) have been forced to abandon IPOs over the past year in markets a lot less volatile than now,
Fantasy oil major M&A
Fred Lucas of JP Morgan has been gazing into his crystal ball:
It is early February 2011 in Irving (TX) and Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, has just concluded a marathon board meeting ahead of the corporation’s Q4 results.
The equity underwriting fat cats
So which banks have the most to lose from the UK Office of Fair Trading market study into equity underwriting fees and associated services?
Over the past ten and a half years the biggest fee earners have been JP Morgan (including Cazenove),
The awards curse strikes at JP Morgan…
Last Friday:
[The Banker Innovation in Banking Technology Awards 2010]
Chair’s Choice and Innovation in Custody and Securities Services
Winner: JPMorgan (Worldwide Securities Services)
Project:
Tradebot shows Goldman what minting money really looks like
Both Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan were able to boast of having made money every single day in the first quarter of 2010. An impressive feat? Certainly.
But how’s this for performance, via the NY Times (emphasis ours):
And the US bank earning season begins…
…with a big earnings beat from JP Morgan.
Via Reuters:
- JPMORGAN REPORTS FIRST-QUARTER 2010 NET INCOME OF $3.3BILLION, OR $0.74PER SHARE, ON REVENUE1 OF $28.2BILLION
- JPMORGAN Q1 REVENUE $28.2 BLN
- JPMORGAN SAYS BALANCE SHEET REMAINED VERY STRONG:
A different kind of bank repurchase
Call it poetic justice. Or perhaps, credit comeuppance.
The ghosts of sketchy mortgage loans are coming back to haunt the banks that created them — in the form of a wave of mortgage repurchases.
The way repurchases work is this.
Musings on mortgage modification-obfuscation
Here’s something to ponder ahead of the US bank earning season.
Mortgage modifications — that is, changes to the terms of home loans — have been running rampant just as banks’ non-performing loans and net-charge-offs appear to be peaking.
The illustrative Maiden Lane I portfolio
Here it is — the ratings composition of Maiden Lane I: the special purpose vehicle created by the Fed to bail out Bear Stearns in 2008. The portfolio’s contents were made public last week.
A few caveats/notes on methodology
We’ve focused on ratings because they’re a quick and simple way to gauge the credit risk of a portfolio.
JP Morgan, I put a spell on you
There’s nothing like hard times to bring out the bank-bashing craziness.
And JP Morgan is no stranger to recession-induced weirdness. For instance, in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression, John Pierpont Morgan Jr.