伦敦鲸前老板喊冤

    上周五，摩根大通(JPMorgan Chase)首席投资办公室前负责人、伦敦鲸布鲁诺•伊科西尔的大老板伊娜•德鲁在参议院负责调查伦敦鲸事件的附属委员会召开的听证会上表示，她受到了误导。此外，尽管这次事件造成了62亿美元（385.02亿元人民币）损失，成为华尔街历史上亏损最严重的投资交易之一，德鲁仍认为自己的工作“合情合理而且勤勉有加”，甚至连相关亏损不断增多的时候也是如此。德鲁的办公室设在纽约，她把大多数责任都推给了伊科西尔。德鲁说，作为下属，伊科西尔在她不知情的情况下夸大了交易仓位的价值，而且没有“如实”计算损失额。参议院公布的调查报告指出，摩根大通交易员在2011年底或2012年初调整了计算投资价值的方法。报告发现，该公司曾将相关投资的日亏损额计为1,200万美元（7,452万元人民币），而实际上这个数字已达到6亿美元（37.26亿元人民币）。

    面对该委员会成员，德鲁说：“我相信自己没有渎职行为，以前和现在我都这么认为。”上周四，参议院就本次交易损失公布了一份300页的报告；而周五的听证会则是去年5月亏损问题公诸于众后德鲁首次公开露面。和她一起在听证会上接受质询的还有多名摩根大通前任和现任高管。委员会负责人、民主党参议员卡尔•莱文用了三个多小时来盘问这些高管。他提出的问题包括：为什么交易价值记录有误？摩根大通的风险控制机制为何不足以限制损失规模等等。莱文表示，面对伦敦鲸事件可能带来的损失，摩根大通非但没有据实相告，还在初步报告中误导了公众和监管机构。

    他说：“摩根大通在风险不断累积的情况下隐瞒损失，无视风险限额，操纵计算模型，逃避监督并向公众传递了错误的信息。”

    已升任副董事长的前首席财务官道格•布朗斯坦称，摩根大通首席执行官杰米•戴蒙曾在2011年要求员工不得向监管机构提供交易信息。布朗斯坦说，戴蒙这样做是因为摩根大通担心提交给监管机构的信息遭到泄露。此事发生两周后，摩根大通重新开始向监管机构汇报交易情况。

    莱文询问的要点之一是摩根大通调整过的一个风险模型。实际上，正是在调整了这个模型之后，伦敦鲸的交易仓位才得以不断膨胀，尽管当时摩根大通管理层曾表示，他们希望按照新的规定降低交易风险。

    摩根大通投资银行业务负责人迈克尔•卡瓦纳表示，他们确实依靠这些模型来了解自身承担了多少风险。他说，对模型的调整有时会降低摩根大通所公布的风险规模。但仅仅为了表明自身风险已经下降而调整风险模型并不符合该公司的政策。首席投资办公室首席风险官彼得•韦兰表示，2012年1月，他曾将一份警告摩根大通可能因信用投资而损失63亿美元（391.23亿元人民币）的报告称为“垃圾”，对此他感到后悔。韦兰说，实际损失和该报告估算的数字相差不到1亿美元(6.21亿元人民币)可能仅仅是个巧合。

    韦兰称：“以我当时所掌握的情况，这些新数字看上去似乎一文不值。”

    德鲁则表示，直到3月底她才了解到投资中存在的问题，时间和媒体开始披露摩根大通令人惊讶地大规模投资信用衍生产品相比只早了一个星期左右。德鲁说，甚至在她发现了潜在问题之后，伦敦办公室的交易员们仍在向她隐瞒信用衍生产品的交易信息。

    On Friday, Ina Drew, the former head of JPMorgan Chase's chief investment office and ultimate boss of the London Whale, told a Senate subcommittee that she was misled. What's more, despite the $6.2 billion loss -- one of the biggest in Wall Street history -- Drew believes she did a "reasonable and diligent" job even as the losses were piling up.

    Drew, who was based in New York, threw much of the blame for the losses onto the firm's former London traders. She said, without her knowledge, the traders who reported to her "inflated" the values of their positions and were not calculating their losses in "good faith."

    A Senate report found that JPMorgan traders shifted the way they were marking the portfolio in either late 2011 or early 2012. In one instance, according to the report, the portfolio's daily loss was recorded as $12 million. It was in fact $600 million.

    "I did not, and do not, believe that I engaged in any misconduct," Drew told senators.

    The hearing came a day after the Senate released a 300-page report on JPMorgan's 2012 trading loss. Drew, in her first public appearance since the losses were revealed last May, was among a number of current and former JPMorgan executives who were questioned on Friday. For more than three hours, Democratic Senator Carl Levin, head of the subcommittee investigating JPMorgan's trading blunder, grilled the executives on why the trades were miss-marked and why JPMorgan's risk controls weren't enough to limit the losses, among other issues. Rather than come clean, Levin said JPMorgan mislead the public and regulators in its initial response to reports about the potential London Whale losses.

    "JPMorgan piled on risk, hid losses, disregarded risk limits,manipulated models, dodged oversight, and misinformed the public," said Levin.

    Former CFO Doug Braunstein, who is now a vice chairman of the bank, said JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon in 2011 ordered bank employees to hold back information about the bank's trades from regulators. Braunstein said Dimon did it because the bank was worried that information being related to regulators was not being kept confidential. The bank resumed reporting trading results to regulators after two weeks.

    One of Levin's key points of inquiry was about a risk model that was changed at the bank that effectively let the London Whale trading position continue to grow, even as officials inside the bank stated they wanted to lower the riskiness of their positions to comply with new regulations.

    Michael Cavanagh, who is the head of JPMorgan's investment bank, said the bank does rely on models to tell it how much risk the bank has. He said at times, changes in models have resulted in the bank reducing its stated risk exposure. But he said it was not the policy of the bank to change its risk models just to show that the bank's risk had dropped.

    Peter Weiland, the chief risk officer of JPMorgan's chief investment office, said he regretted calling a report that warned the bank could lose $6.3 billion in January 2012 in its credit portfolio "garbage." Weiland said it was probably less than a coincidence that the actual loss ended up being within $100 million of that original estimate.

    "We got some new numbers, and they looked like garbage from what I could tell," said Weiland.

    For her part, Drew said she only learned of the problems in the portfolio in late March, just a week or so before media reports began to emerge about the surprisingly large bets the bank had made on credit derivatives. Even after she found out about potential problems, Drew said traders in London continued to hide information from her about the credit trades.