Second, Dimon is facing much bigger losses than this one trade. Dimon set up the chief investment office about five years ago to invest the bank's excess cash more aggressively. Up until recently, it has worked. JPMorgan's CIO office has turned in about $500 million in profit a year. This year it was on track to add $800 million to the firm's bottom line. While Dimon has yet to say whether he is shutting down the division, it's likely he will at the least have to scale it back. Investors will demand it. Expect the division, which used to go mostly unnoticed, to be the focus of a barrage of questions each quarter until it is shrunk dramatically or goes away. No one will ever trust to ignore it again.
And that might not be the only business that JPMorgan has to retreat from. By far what makes JPMorgan the riskiest bank on Wall Street, and one of the most profitable, is the bank's derivative trading book, which is far larger than any other bank in the world. JPMorgan holds derivatives contracts with a notional value of just over $1.6 trillion. That's enough to wipe out the bank's capital nearly 10 times over. Of course, JPMorgan says its derivative bets aren't nearly that big or as risky as they appear. Factor in hedges and collateral, and the bank says its actual exposure is just $66 billion. But we have just seen how well JPMorgan's hedges can work.
Lastly, one of the reasons that Dimon has been able to claim the crown of King of the Street, besides the fact that his bank had smaller losses in the financial crisis than rivals, is that, even after the credit crunch, he has continued to show better results. JPMorgan's return on equity, a key measure in finance, is higher than any other bank. Last year, the bank's ROE clocked in at 16%, compared to 9% for Goldman Sachs. But one of the reasons that JPMorgan has been able to turn in such high numbers is because the bank has had relatively low levels of capital.
If investors demand JPMorgan raise its capital level to what Goldman has, the company's ROE would drop to around 10%. All of a sudden, Dimon is no longer leading the pack. He's just average. And that might be the biggest blow to JPMorgan. Part of the reason for investing in the company in the past few years is that Dimon, and his ability to manage risk, comes along with the package. We all seemed to have placed way too much faith in the idea that one individual could protect a bank with $2 trillion in assets from blow-ups.
"Banks are always black boxes," says Michael Mayo, an analyst at Credit Agricole and author of the recent book Exile on Wall Street. "You have to rely on the executives and the systems in place to manage that risk." Betting on Dimon, and JPMorgan, just became a lot less reliable than it used to be.
