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Related: About this forumNot a decent banker around
http://atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GECON-01-260313.htmlNot a decent banker around
By Martin Hutchinson
Mar 26, '13
In the past week, the detailed revelations from JP Morgan's grilling in the US Senate have combined with the Cyprus rescue blunder to generate one inescapable conclusion: public or private sector, European or American, there isn't a decent, competent banker among them. Truly almost 20 years of funny money and 30-40 years of misguided deregulation have drained the financial sector of the quiet competence it used to exhibit.
I wrote about JP Morgan's "London Whale" derivatives insanities of early 2012 a few weeks ago. It demonstrated two failings that appear to me unforgivable. First, in spite of the experience of 2007-08 Morgan was still using value-at-risk as a major element of its risk management.
Kevin Dowd and I pointed out the irretrievable flaws in this methodology in Alchemists of Loss, published in June 2010 - and we were by no means alone in doing so, though we may have had a "better mousetrap" than others in terms of an alternative risk management approach. A bank of Morgan's stature has a duty to keep up with the literature; it's as simple as that.
The second failing is even more fundamental, because it rests on what Morgan thinks a bank should be doing. Bruno Iksil, the London Whale, was attempting to "corner the market" in an obscure and artificial credit default swap (CDS) contract.
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Not a decent banker around (Original Post)
unhappycamper
Mar 2013
OP
Warpy
(111,254 posts)1. I knew one decent banker.
He was hired in upper management and lasted six months before he quit in utter disgust.
They get decent ones in from time to time. My guess is that they can't keep any of them.
The next time they fail (and they will, none of the changes that might prevent it were made), the banks should be nationalized and the top management gone. It's the only way to destroy the corrupt culture that will have us going from failure to failure, from bailout to bailout. Enough is enough.
Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)2. I saw one in the obituaries.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)3. They all smell of doom now, the consumer banks.
You walk in, there are a few unmotivated low-level employees hanging around, the manager is hiding somewhere, and nobody pays any attention to you except the guard.