JPMorgan Execs Will Get Grilled Today After Brutal Senate Report That Said The Bank Was Misleading Investors
The witnesses at today's hearing include Ina Drew, the former Chief Investment Officer; Ashley Bacon, the current Chief Risk Officer; Peter Weiland, the former head of market risk in the CIO; Michael Cavanagh, co-CEO of the investment bank and Douglass Braunstein, the former CFO.
The bank's CEO Jamie Dimon will not be testifying. He appeared on Capitol Hill twice last summer.
What will be interesting to watch is Ina Drew. This will be Drew's first public appearance since she retired following the trading blunder. She was a 30 year veteran at JPMorgan and the head of risk management.
Ahead of the hearing, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a 300-page report yesterday afternoon slamming JPMorgan claiming the bank mislead investors and regulators over the "London Whale" trade. (You can download the .PDF here)
Basically, the senate report claims that JPMorgan misled investors and regulators by hiding losses and mismarking credit derivatives values in the Synthetic Credit Portfolio. The report also says that the bank executives ignored risks.
The "London Whale" first surfaced back in April 2012 when both Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal reported that a trader, Bruno Iksil, had a position so big it was rattling the market. Iksil was nicknamed the "London Whale" because of his position size.
Dimon initially dismissed the media reports as a "tempest in a teapot."
Then on May 10th, JPMorgan revealed a $2 billion dollar trading loss in its Chief Investment Office in London related to those derivatives trades from the so-called "London Whale."
In June, Dimon was grilled before the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee.
On July 13th, the bank released its Q2 earnings results and it was revealed that the trading loss was actually $5.8 billion, which was much more than previously thought.