Jamie Dimon’s Personal Hedge Fund At JP Morgan Has Likely Become The Tipping Point In The Global Economic Storm

To summarize for new readers, we were very bearish on banks going into the 2008 collapse.  At the time I even wrote on here that I liquidated my family’s holdings in Wall Street firms at what later became evident was within a few percentage points of the banking index peak.  Then when Citi hit 99 cents, I said that I was no longer bearish on banks because exogenous factors would determine their future.  And, that the seeds of a rally were building.  Those exogenous factors turned out to be the attempted reliquification of these firms through various facilities including the allowance of predatory banking to continue its pillaging within the global economy.  ie, No meaningful reforms.  Then, again within literally a month, we top ticked the banking index again in 2010 and remarked that I was again bearish on banks.   That call has turned out to be the ultimate peak of the banking index off of the 2008 collapse.   It has been down ever since. 

Now let’s fast forward to 2012.   In February, I wrote that the coming week of March 19th was a disconcerting week ahead.  That week turned out to be the top in the European bond market.   And that very fact meant the week of March 19 was the tipping point for this JP Morgan crisis that is tied to deteriorating European bonds.  In fact, as I noted a little over a month ago, many market internals literally peaked the exact day of March 19.   As a point of reference, it was just five days before March 19 that JP Morgan upset the Federal Reserve by front-running a bank stress test announcement with its arrogant announcement of a dividend increase.  Do you think Jamie Dimon really knows what he is doing?  No one can manage a firm that large and it is his very delusions of self-importance that even allows him to remotely believe he can.   King Jamie’s empire was shifting beneath his feet at the very moment he was increasing his dividend and he didn’t have a clue.  Politicians and all bureaucracies around the globe should take note that their empires too are shifting beneath their feet and control is nothing more than an illusion.

I may not write about much of the detailed analysis on here, but I have a very, very firm grasp on money and banking in this country.  Our calls have been spot on for years.  It takes a lot of work but it’s not rocket science. 

As noted a month or so ago, I think it’s most likely that with the passage of March 2012, we have gone beyond the point of no return.  That we are now in the early stages of the beginning of the end of the world as we know it.  The back end of this economic storm I have been writing for years would make 2008 look like a picnic.  And, that means all of the outcomes we have been writing that haven’t yet come to pass could be just around the corner.   Some of those include the end of capitalism, globalization, global finance, a corrupt monetary and banking system, empire, the military-industrial complex, political parties, massive corporations, debt-based money’s economic slavery, the end of the stock market as we know it and possibly even the end of money, or money as we know it, as well as other dynamics we have written about.  Some of these are most certainly foregone conclusions and are already in the midst of coming to pass.   All of these and more are very real possibilities, if not probabilities.    Albeit, we most certainly won’t wake up one day to see the world completely different.  The world will likely change through a process of failure over many years or even a decade.   Time is a very difficult element to predict.  But I expect the next three years to reveal crises in much of what will eventually fail.  And, some remedies to coming crises will be attempted yet ultimately fail as well.  Mostly because they aren’t based on truth but instead attempts at maintaining control.  Just as Dodd-Frank and the Obama healthcare plan will most certainly fail based on simple math.  Both of these horrible pieces of legislation serve a primary intent of the status quo maintaining control over any form of truth.

This current situation at JP Morgan is EXACTLY what we wrote was going to happen at least a dozen times after the 2008 crash.  That Wall Street was still holding the bag on risky financial assets and risky bets and had traded counterparties out of financial markets.   And, that because the poker pot wasn’t being refilled, aka wealth creation, eventually crises in these bets would be exposed when the Federal Reserve’s pool of false liquidity started receding.  In other words, without a continuous monetary easing and rigging of markets to bail out the massively corrupt Federal Reserve broker dealers, 2008 was just the beginning of the end.  The opportunity to fix this mess and embrace truth has passed.  As we noted, Glass-Steagall is now too little, too late.  I think it’s rather telling on some level that we have been writing for years that Wall Street has won nothing.  Yet many felt substantial despair and helplessness at changing a system that persecutes and preys on innocent people.   In the end, this crisis is most certainly going to take care of itself if politicians and corporate leaders refuse to take care of it.

An FT article highlights an incredibly disturbing situation at JP Morgan.  (You might need a free signin but as I have noted before, it’s worth the two minutes to sign up for the FT.  Much more so than any other mainstream financial rag.)

…….The unit, the chief investment office (CIO), has been the biggest buyer of European mortgage-backed bonds and other complex debt securities such as collateralised loan obligations in all markets for three years, more than a dozen senior traders and credit experts have told the Financial Times……… But the CIO has also dominated market activity and built up huge positions in other, equally esoteric markets, according to leading traders…….’I can’t see how they could unwind these positions because no one can replace them in terms of size. It’s a bit of the same problem they face with the derivatives trade,’ said a credit trader at a rival bank. ‘They pretty much are the market.’

In other words, JP Morgan is holding the bag as it has come to dominate markets for financial derivatives and financial assets.   And, there is no counterparty large enough to offload the trade to.  Well, other than the taxpayers.  And, it isn’t just this current bad trade either.  It is in other “esoteric” markets as it noted in this article.    That is exactly what we said was going to happen for the last three/four years.   It’s a matter of simple math that it must happen.  As financial markets are rigged, the corrupt firms that rig them come to dominate exposure to them.  JP Morgan and other massive firms are now Lehman, Bear, MF Global, Merrill, Wachovia, etc.    And, as the pool of large firms get smaller, the concentration of bad bets becomes more severe.

This crisis points out another fact that isn’t being reported; how leveraged Wall Street is in financial markets and financial assets.  Just like in 2008.   JP Morgan is massively levered to Europe.  What is an American bank backed by American taxpayers, granted special privilege in its existence by our government doing placing bets in Europe?   They should have no legal right to even be operating in Europe.  Zero.  More on that in a future post.

The stress tests Geithner and regulators proudly told us that U.S. banks passed really tells us nothing.   They are a very simpleminded point-in-time analysis.  Geithner really had no idea what was going on inside of JP Morgan or any other firm or how the world is shifting underneath them.  Neither do regulators.  Remember it was just two months ago that JP Morgan arrogantly raised its dividend in front of a Federal Reserve banking stress test announcement.   JP Morgan is holding the bag on so many instruments that their financial position cannot be clearly appreciated.   These issues aren’t even tied to what is supposed to be their primary function of lending to create jobs in our society – something they do little of.  Wait till that core lending business that is their primary function starts tipping again.   As just one example, JP Morgan is ground zero for the predatory housing mess in this country.  In just one slice of its lending business, it has massive home equity lines of credit exposure have yet to hit their ten year grace period of interest-only payments.  Nearly the equivalent of 100% of tier one capital could be consumed by home equity issues.   And, the amount of those loans that are in trouble at this moment is already huge.    The global economy is now turning south again.  All the while Dimon has been siphoning off loss reserve capital to pad JP Morgan’s earnings.   

We really can’t draw any firm conclusions into this most recent crisis but we can most certainly conclude this particular crisis at JP Morgan is far from over.  I’m not sure that anyone has the transparency into what risky bets were made and to what degree those bets have been unwound or if they are still turning against JP Morgan.  Or what financial paper they actually hold.  We really don’t know what exactly is going on partly because banks have become repositories for opaque deception and partly because the gambling instruments they are using to deceive us are opaque and unregulated, also because of deception.  So, we really have no clue who is holding what bag or how big the bag is.  Obviously we now know Jamie Dimon is holding one hell of a big bag in bond and bond derivative markets.  Likely in commodities as well.  Who knows what else.  And, there is most certainly more.  But it most certainly is not just JP Morgan.  It’s all of these big Wall Street firms that are levered to the hilt.

I think it’s fair to now consider there may have been some attempts at deception and even possibly mistruths when Dimon first went into PR damage control involving this mess.   That is obviously why the FBI is now involved, although there most certainly won’t be any dung that lands on Dimon.   Federal Reserve broker-dealer CEOs are protected by the state.  Justice will not be served although some poor bastard in the trenches most certainly could be thrown under the bus.  In the weeks that have passed, we now are gaining a greater public appreciation for the systemic lack of competence across enormous chunks of JP Morgan’s business.  By the way, the chief investment office that made these blunders reported directly to Dimon.  So I think it’s fair to say he is personally responsible for this crisis and we can discount his whining of being a victim of other people’s poor decisions.    The chief investment office, under Dimon’s supervision or lack thereof, was essentially running an unregulated hedge fund making trillions of dollars in gambling bets using society’s money.  All for the self-interested greed and power of Jamie Dimon.   It surely wasn’t for democracy or society.  This is not the actions of a public servant (publicly traded bank and broker-dealer for the Fed)  who is granted special authority to protect society’s capital.   It seems more the actions of a megalomaniac.   The signs of an unstable perception of self were always there.  From the involvement in overturning Glass-Steagall to an insatiable desire for more and more power that led him to buy bank after bank in building his personal empire to his endless chaffing against doing what is in democracy’s interest in favor of serving his own vainglory and need for more.  This is why we don’t allow monopolies or oligopolies in our economy any more than we should allow concentrated power to go unchecked in our government.  Our founders fathers are rolling over in their graves with the likes of predatory Wall Street CEOs running amok over our society.  But, now we live in a society and economic system that rewards aggression, including against its own citizens so this type of behavior is exalted by the state.   Dimon is a capitalist hero in the Washington-Wall Street crowd, although he has never created anything.  He has simply taken more and more.

JP Morgan is clearly loaded up on European bonds and if they have  countless naked derivatives positions on top of those bonds, this could possibly turn into one hell of a massive mess.  We don’t yet know enough to draw any clear cut conclusions but it is conceivable this could be a Lehman type of mess coupled with a LTCM type of mess but only massively larger than both.  And, this is just one firm.  One of the fundamentally disturbing issues behind this most recent JP Morgan crisis that isn’t being reported is the ECB does not have any formal facilities like the Federal Reserve to truly stop a banking crisis.   Not only has JP Morgan made incredibly incompetent decisions, maybe more importantly, there is no backstop in Europe for the investments in its debt and derivatives that Dimon’s personal hedge fund has made bets on.   Without U.S. intervention again, it is conceivable JP Morgan could eventually fail because of this foolishness.  King Jamie, the financial genius, clearly should understand this very simple fact of ECB operations and monetary abilities.  He clearly didn’t and still doesn’t.  Instead he made incredibly foolish decisions that someone blogging in his underwear knew were foolish and never would have made.   One of the smartest bankers in our country re Obama’s comment?  Not even close.  One of the most incompetent, power mad and greedy.  That seems more likely.  It’s only been the endless money printing over the last twenty years that masked the corruption and incompetence that defines Wall Street.  Those days are over.  Over the last handful of years we are starting to see the rot.

Two things we know for certain.  Jamie Dimon has created a Frankenstein and the self-professed illusion of his own brilliance was nothing more than a complete work of fiction.   And, Obama’s rhetoric about the Dodd-Frankenstein bill saving us from this situation is also an illusion based on fiction.  Dodd-Frank would have not stopped this at all.   Jamie and his Wall Street cronies already took care of that - the best legislation money can buy.  

Early in the Obama presidency I wrote that his lack of leadership and lack of fortitude to transform Wall Street would eventually lead to future crises.  And, that could lead to a crisis of confidence in our government where all trust could be completely lost.  We could very well be close to this dynamic manifesting itself as early as this year or in the next few years.  Regardless of what happens in Washington from this day forward or whether Obama wins the 2012 elections, there could quite possibly be a crisis of confidence so large that makes it impossible for either party to govern.   And, it could come at any moment.   Without massive reform, this environment simply cannot be contained.  We most certainly could witness some manifestation of dynamics here in the U.S., similar to what we have seen in Iceland and quite a few European countries.   ie, The government loses its legitimacy to rule and is dissolved.  Just because it has never happened does not mean it cannot.

This all ties in very nicely into our long term theses that this cycle could be coined the end of big and the failure of institutions of the ego or institutions of control.  And, that global finance is dead…. and countless other outcomes we have written about.  It’s coming.   Over the last handful of years I have told quite a few people who work for JP Morgan that they should be prepared financially for the company to unwind, fail or both.   Every single person chuckled at those remarks.  They believed the deceit and lies that JP Morgan was a model bank that missed the 2008 crisis.  A myth created through the endless self-aggrandizing mouthing of Jamie Dimon.   JP Morgan was one of the most exposed banks in this country.  How ironic would it be that the back end of this economic storm were kicked off by the very person who was sure to let everyone else know he didn’t need a bailout in 2008.  That his firm was in great shape because of his brilliant leadership.  A lie based solely on ego and the delusions of his own self-importance..  That his empire of corruption and predation was doing just fine.  Karma is indeed a bitch.   

For the umpteenth time, the Federal Reserve cannot fix our economy.   This crisis was created by politicians.  Monetary policy isn’t going to fix it.   It most certainly could help ameliorate the crisis if used properly within the context of reform but that isn’t happening.   Instead, the Fed is simply reflated the same failed policies that have already collapsed.    That has made the bubble substantially larger.  That reflation is behind this new crisis at JP Morgan.  The Fed’s bailout of systemic incompetence in its broker-dealer network over the last handful of years is the only way JP Morgan could once again make even more bad bets in Europe – endless free money provided by the Federal Reserve for endless JP Morgan gambling.  The Fed simply enabled Dimon’s systemic incompetence that is behind these new flawed bets.   Without all of the free money granted JP Morgan by a corrupt Federal Reserve, this never would have happened.  Dimon and all of Wall Street’s executive teams should have been fired and the banks broken up back in 2008.  And proper reforms instituted immediately including investigations and prosecutions into wrongdoing.  Instead they were rewarded with an unlimited supply of taxpayer funded money by the Federal Reserve and Washington politicians.