London Whale Harpooned, Beached, Whatever You Want to Call It, to Tune of $2 Billion

You remember Voldemoort, the London whale, or just plain old Bruno Iksil, the JPMorgan Chase trader who took supposedly huge

You remember Voldemoort, the London whale, or just plain old Bruno Iksil, the JPMorgan Chase trader who took supposedly huge positions for the bank’s chief investment office, supposedly throwing a whole credit index out of whack?

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Apparently things aren’t going so well. From JPMorgan’s 10-Q, filed today:

“Since March 31, 2012, CIO has had significant mark-to-market losses in its synthetic credit portfolio, and this portfolio has proven to be riskier, more volatile and less effective as an economic hedge than the Firm previously believed.”

How bad is it? Jamie Dimon just told investors during a conference call that losses could total $2 billion, and that “it could get worse. This could go on for a little bit,” which qualifies as stunning not a month after Dimon called the Iksil/CIO story “a complete tempest in a teapot.”

Meanwhile, we can’t help wondering about the hedge funds that stirred up the Voldemoort stories last month. As Alphaville (and others) noted at the time, the sources in the early Iksil stories seemed to be investors who were trading against him. Stay tuned.

[Mario Tama/Getty Images News]

 

 

London Whale Harpooned, Beached, Whatever You Want to Call It, to Tune of $2 Billion