All business has risk but banks in particular are supposed to calculate the downside carefully before jumping in. Now it’s come out that JP Morgan has been taking insane risks with billions of dollars in the stock market equivalent of trying to win the Lotto. Of course, they lost. The early estimates set the damage at $2 billion. A London trader who was apparently under the very eye of the president of JPMorgan, Jamie Dimon, has been transforming the U-K investment office from one that tried to limit risk into one that rolled the dice with the company’s assets. The trader, Bruno Michel Iksil, has become known for huge transactions and has earned the nickname of the mysterious Harry Potter villain Voldemort. All very cute but perhaps we should be asking the Canadian banks if there is anything going on downtown that we should know about.
