The stock ran up despite its huge trading loss-a flashing neon sign that the world's global banks are too big to manage and too addicted to risk, writes MoneyShow's Jim Jubak, also of Jubak's Picks.
Shares of JPMorgan Chase (JPM) rose almost 6% on Friday, on news that the bank's loss from its London Whale trade was just $5.8 billion and that revenues of $22.89 billion were above the Wall Street estimate of $21.7 billion.
Frankly, I find the jump in JPMorgan Chase stock deeply disturbing. It's yet one more sign, if you need one, of exactly how cynical Wall Street has become, and of how corrupt the world's banking system is.
I can explain the rally in JPMorgan shares. It's the logic of that explanation that I find so profoundly troubling. Especially in the context of the global financial crisis.
Remember Lehman Brothers, Countrywide Financial [acquired by Bank of America (BAC) for $4.1 billion in 2008], and American International Group (AIG), rescued with $85 billion in loans by the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury?. Following closely on those heels is the news that Barclays (BCS) and other global banks had rigged the Libor interest-rate benchmark.
So many investors have thrown up their hands in disgust, and now won't invest in the financial markets at all because they think they're corrupt and rigged. Or, they invest cynically, figuratively holding their noses. Who can blame them? Not I, certainly.
Think about the logic that explains the 6% gain in shares of JPMorgan Chase. First, there's the argument that the $5.8 billion loss from the disastrously complex London Whale trade (put on by an employee in London) shouldn't count because it's a one-time problem.
This is the position taken by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who said in announcing the bank's second-quarter earnings that the results showed "really good underlying performance."
Kind of hard to see, actually. Even if you look past that huge loss.
A Closer Look at JPM's Earnings
Reported earnings for the second quarter came in at $1.21 a share, a drop from the $1.27 a share reported for the second quarter of 2011. Revenue fell by 16.5% from the second quarter of 2011.
Further breaking down the income statement, revenue from fixed income and equity markets dropped to $4.54 billion in the quarter, from $5.36 billion in the second quarter of 2011.
The bank did much better in bread-and-butter banking than it did on the investment banking and trading side. Revenue from retail banking, which includes home loans and checking, rose to $7.9 billion in the quarter, from $7.1 billion in the second quarter of 2011. Income for this unit climbed to $2.3 billion from $383 million. Mortgage fees and related revenue rose to $1.6 billion from $595 million. Net income climbed to $931 million from $286 million in the second quarter of 2011.
But even in JPMorgan Chase's banking business, there were signs of trouble on the horizon. Net interest margin-the difference between what the bank makes on its loans and what it pays to raise cash in the financial markets-dropped to 2.47% in the second quarter from 2.72% in the same period last year.
All this good news matters only if you agree with Wall Street accounting. There was the assumption that the brutal $4.4 billion pretax loss on the London Whale trading position was a one-time event. And them there was the bookkeeping that offset much of that loss with a $1 billion pretax gain in the securities in the chief investment office portfolio, a $2.1 billion pretax benefit from a reduction in loan-loss reserves, an $800 million gain from debit valuation adjustments, and a few other items.
If you exclude all these accounting adjustments, JPMorgan Chase earned 67 cents a share. That is well below the 76 cents a share projected by Wall Street analysts.
Wall Street has played fast and loose with bank earnings since the financial crisis, dismissing some losses as one-time events and counting some gains that I'd call one-time as part of a bank's regular revenue stream. That's exactly what Wall Street analysts and the stock market seem to have done again this quarter with JPMorgan Chase.
To me, that seems profoundly wrong. If the financial crisis has taught us anything, it's that the big global investment banks have made risky trading with their own money-the sort of activity that resulted in $5.8 billion and counting in losses from the London Whale position-a core part of their business model.
Goldman Sachs (GS) does it. Citigroup (C) does it. Bank of America does it.
The gains and losses from those activities may be lumpy and may swing from plus to minus with any quarter, but they can't be discounted as one-time events. The big global investment banks are engaged in activities like this every day.
To say that JPMorgan Chase's core banking business is doing fine-and ask investors to somehow consider trading losses as outside the core-profoundly misrepresents the risk of the current investment banking model.
NEXT: Was London Whale Really Rogue?
|pagebreak|Was London Whale Really a Rogue?
Then there's the related logic that says that a loss like the $5.8 billion London Whale loss is just an accident, bad luck, the result of a rogue trader or whatever. Again, I think that's a total misrepresentation of the core problems at global investment banks.
These banks are indeed too big to manage. And they have fully embraced a culture of risk-taking at the same time that they've refused to admit that they can't manage to keep the risk within bounds or make sure that it doesn't spiral into a culture of deception.
Notice that the defense that the CEOs at JPMorgan Chase and Barclays have both offered in the London Whale and Libor scandals blows the accident defense out of the water. (I'm pretty sure that isn't what either bank intended.)
At JPMorgan Chase, Dimon has told investors and Congress that he didn't know that the chief investment office was out of control until the London Whale trade blew up on the bank. JPMorgan Chase admitted to investors this quarter that it had a material weakness of internal controls. Some traders, the bank said, misstated or mispriced positions in order to avoid showing the full extent of their losses.
And it wasn't just in the second quarter of 2012. Last week, the bank moved to restate earnings for the first quarter of 2012, as well.
The chief investment office team, the bank's internal investigation said, created a portfolio of derivative positions that "grew to a perilous size with numerous embedded risks that the team didn't understand and were not equipped to manage."
"Didn't understand?" "Were not equipped to manage?" And nobody noticed?
Either Jamie Dimon and the rest of the management team at JPMorgan Chase isn't nearly as competent as Wall Street has said it is-which would be a serious indictment of banking analysts and conventional wisdom on the Street-or they are indeed pretty smart men and women who have failed at the impossible task of running a very risky business at an investment banking behemoth that is simply unmanageable.
That's a much scarier proposition.
Risk Run Amok
It gets even scarier when you consider the story line that shows the once conservatively- run chief investment office gradually becoming accustomed to taking on more risk, as the managers of that unit worked to turn it into a major profit center for the bank.
I don't think this is an isolated occurrence. Managers at many banks apparently no longer believe that traditional, low-risk, bread-and-butter banking generates the level of returns that a bank should earn.
Want to see what the pressure for higher returns produces when it is combined with management that isn't up to the job of running an impossibly complex global investment bank? Take a look at the unfolding Libor scandal.
So far, Barclays has agreed to pay a $450 million fine to settle charges that the bank manipulated the Libor benchmark interest rate used to price everything from mortgages to home-equity loans to derivative contracts used for hedging risk by corporations and governments, all so that it would look more financially solid to regulators, credit-rating agencies, and investors.
How far back does the manipulation go? The Bank of England and the New York Fed, to name just two parties, seem to have stumbled upon the manipulation as early as 2008. Barclay's international documents push the beginning of the manipulation back to 2005.
But the inaction by regulators for four to seven years isn't the most distressing part of the Libor scandal. Libor is calculated daily by the British Bankers' Association as the average interest rate at which 16 big international banks based in London can borrow from each other.
It's just about impossible to imagine, therefore, that Barclays could have manipulated the Libor without the active or at least passive involvement of other banks. That is certainly the message of a memo that Barclays management sent out to the bank's staff after Barclays' settlement with US and UK regulators.
"As other banks settle with authorities, and their details become public, and various government inquiries shed more light, our situation will eventually be put in perspective," the memo says.
Where Will the Libor Scandal Stop?
In other words, Barclays won't seem quite so culpable because further investigation will reveal that everybody does it.
Who's everybody? The New York Times reports that UBS (UBS) is under investigation, but I'm sure the Libor scandal won't stop there.
I don't see any way to argue convincingly that the Libor scandal was just an accident, or even that it was just a management failure at a single bank. Replacing Robert Diamond with a better CEO isn't going to fix the problem, because the problem is at the heart of the current incarnation of a global investment bank: too big to manage and too addicted to risk.
And if that's indeed the case, there's also no way that the JPMorgan Chase London Whale disaster is just a one-time event. It's central to the way the bank does business.
And it's about time that the financial markets started treating it that way.
