Trading operations at Knight Capital Group are running again after the firm was forced to stop accepting orders yesterday amid a power outage at its Jersey City headquarters.
The market maker, which had been running on backup generators since Sandy landed on Monday evening, is said to have lost power around 11:45 a.m. yesterday. According Read More
In the end, U.S. stock markets decided to heed the storm.
The New York Stock Exchange had planned to open trading electronically while shuttering its physical trading floor. “We are open for business and at the same time acting in accordance with actions taken by the city and state of New York,” said NYSE CEO Duncan L. Niederauer said in a release yesterday afternoon.
But NYSE reversed course last night, announcing it would halt operations completely. The exchange is closed today, and may close tomorrow, “pending confirmation,” according to a release.
Nasdaq is also closed today; “it is likely that the markets will be closed” tomorrow, the exchange said in a release.
Bond markets will open, but the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association recommended that markets close at noon today. Read More
There’s been a fair amount of talk lately about departures from JPMorgan’s inner circle, which is what will happen when veteran executives start departing or shifting duties.
Four executives have departed from the firm’s 15-member operating committee in the last year, including, of course, Ina Drew, the firm’s former chief investment officer who fell on her sword following the multi-billion trading loss associated with the London Whale. In the shake up that followed, younger executives Mike Cavanagh and Matt Zames rose to new prominence, while Jes Staley, once thought to be a possible successor to Jamie Dimon, went off to audition for Barclays top job.
Then Barry Zubrow, the firm’s head of regulatory affairs and former chief risk officer, said he would retire at the end of the year, followed by a Wall Street Journal report on Wednesday that chief financial officer Doug Braunstein would exit his current post for a new role at the bank sometime over the next two quarters.
Fortunately for the kibbitzers among us, JPMorgan had a conference call to discuss third-quarter earnings scheduled for the this morning. Read More
Two giant JPMorgan profiles landed this week, and it was a familiar character who delivered some of the more memorable lines in each of them. James Bainbridge Lee Jr.—better, Jimmy—is the legendary deal maker this paper once described as “the maestro of the syndicated loan market, Wall Street’s most famous corporate bailout artist,” now the vice chairman for investment banking at JPMorgan.
That position—and, we suppose, that he was willing to pick up the phone and go on record—made him a natural source for Vanity Fair’s profile of Jamie Dimon, in which Mr. Lee offers the first (and last?) word on the JPMorgan chief executive (“[He] has moral courage running through his veins”); and also serves as a catalyst for the tidbit VF used to hype the story—in the middle of the hubbub over the London Whale, Mr. Lee asked New England Patriots quarterback to tell Mr. Dimon “to hang in there.“ Read More
New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed a civil lawsuit against JPMorgan yesterday, charging the firm with widespread fraud committed by the mortgage securitization unit of Bear Stearns, which JPMorgan acquired in 2008. Not everyone was impressed.
JPMorgan spokesman Joe Evangelisti said the bank was “disappointed” that Mr. Schneiderman filed his lawsuit without giving Read More
Every now and then, a lawsuit or legislative report emerges to remind us just how out-of-control the U.S. mortgage business was in the years leading up to the financial crisis, and a civil tort filed today by the New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is a fine example. (A congressional investigation into Countrywide’s program to provide discounted loans to lawmakers, the results of which were published in July, also comes to mind.)
Mr. Schneiderman’s suit brings fraud charges against JPMorgan with widespread misconduct in the packaging and sale of mortgage securities committed by Bear Stearns. These practices, of course, helped sink Bear Stearns, leading the investment bank to be acquired by JPMorgan in 2008, and the broad details—that Bear so coveted the profit available by selling mortgage-backed bonds that it became indiscriminate in the loans it purchased for securitization—are well known, and were common to any number of Wall Street banks. For all the ubiquity of the alleged practices, Mr. Schneiderman’s complaint still makes for a shocking read: Read More
The British Financial Services Authority is wresting oversight of the London interbank lending rate from the British Bankers Association as part of an overhaul of the process by which Libor is set. The British government will take a more hands on role, and submissions will be delayed for three months, perhaps diminishing the temptation to rig rates for the purpose of managing perception of a bank’s health.
Right on time, The Wall Street Journal has an “analysis” that shows Libor doesn’t actually reflect banks’ borrowing costs.
Kareem Serageldin, the former head of Credit Suisse’s CDO business arrested in London on Wednesday, said he will fight extradition to the U.S. When Mr. Serageldin was charges in February for running a scheme to falsify trading positions, he expressed surprise over the indictment, noting through lawyers that he was cooperating with attorneys. When he was nabbed outside the U.S. embassy in London this week, he said through a lawyer that he was working on a plea deal, and that his capture was the result of “miscommunication.” Read More
“I felt like in finance, the playbook was already written, and it was my job to execute,” said Vinicius Vacanti, co-founder and chief executive officer of Yipit, a startup that delivers personalized daily deals aggregated from other services. “Someone had done it before I did, and someone was going to do it after. In a startup, there’s no playbook. You’re making it up as you go along.”
It was Wednesday night at General Assembly, and 30 bankers, mostly young, mostly male, mostly dressed in shirts and slacks and keeping one eye trained on their mobile devices, had turned out to listen to founders from New York’s startup scene talk about their transitions from Wall Street to Silicon Alley. It was a hot ticket.
Call it a function of lower pay at financial firms amid lower profits and increased regulation, call it the Facebook Effect, in which the best-and-the-brightest dream of becoming the next Zuckerberg or Pincus—or changing in cultural attitudes, though we’ve yet to meet a young banker who said that the Occupy movement influenced them personally. Call it what you want, but if the 70 names on the waiting list for last night’s event is any indication, the startup world is increasingly appealing the to smart, ambitious 20-somethings who chart a path that starts at investment banking. Read More
When former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty was campaigning to be the Republican presidential nominee, he told reporters that his “truth message to Wall Street is going to be, ‘Get your snout out of the trough.’” Which, maybe that’s still his truth message? But instead of delivering it as co-chairman of Mitt Romney’s campaign, Governor Pawlenty will be speaking it as head of the Financial Services Roundtable, a banking industry lobby.
Somewhere, an algorithm read the coverage of yesterday’s Senate Banking Committee hearing on high-frequency trading, and figured it will take years for the government to hammer out reforms to fix market structure issues. Read More
Protestors will attempt to surround the New York Stock Exchange on the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement, according to Reuters. Looking to meet up with some like-minded people? Want to know which intersections to avoid? Go here, for the tactical map.
The Winklevoss twins are disrupting the sell side, or Read More
