I went to a conference yesterday which started very well, but ended up about as scary as Romney’s economic policy. Why? Because a regulator from a minor European country (but who nevertheless is apparently influential at ESMA) suggested that it was official policy to substantially reduce the size of the OTC markets in general, and the inter-dealer market in particular.

The completely predictable result was published in an article in Risk on Wednesday:

Interestingly though, the Bank of England just stopped asking for one such special exception when it comes to certain derivatives that it enters into on behalf of the nation in order to best manage its balance sheet and the Treasury’s foreign exchange reserves.

JPMorgan management have put their hands up since the announcement of $2bn of losses, effectively saying, ‘yeah, whoops, we totally messed that one up. Buck stops here. We’re looking into preventing that from ever happening again. We’ve learned that no matter how good a division’s past performance, one simply cannot ever be complacent.’ They are taking their (very, very sizable) share of the blame.

The desire to understand what the trade was and the rationale behind it continues to bug us and many others. Interestingly, some of the discussion of late has come full circle. Bloomberg kicked off the London Whale saga on April 6th, and their follow-up on April 9th contained a detail that has now come back into the narrative. This time, though, it’s more than a mere sidenote — more on this in a minute.

FT Alphaville has analysed the credit trades that might be in that portfolio, in an attempt to reason through what may have gone on. The fact, however, remains that we know precious little. Why is that? Is this acceptable that after the financial crisis that this can happen to a bank, let alone a systemically important one like JP Morgan?

We’ll get to these questions a bit later, as we would first like to review how the $2bn mark-to-market loss announced on Thursday may have happened…

– FT Alphaville’s Internal Monologue

In a recent Alphaville post, I made the claim that if the monolines had been required to mark the credit risk that they had taken to market, they would not have played such a prominent role in the financial crisis. Here I want to provide some support for that claim.

If only it were that easy. In fact, there are lots of issues with OTC derivatives clearing. Today, we’ll just look at one aspect: that of margin.