Archive - Jul 15, 2012

On Friday morning, Jamie Dimon as head of the bank many (well, some: Zero Hedge) expect will be the first casualty when the Liebor scandal finally breaks on US soil, which it will within 2-3 weeks, faced several questions on his Q2 conference call trying to extract more information from the bank as to where it may stand in the Liebor scandal. Jamie was not only not very talkative, but refused to answer questions why by default should have had an answer - i.e., internal controls, which after the discovery 10 minutes prior to the earnigs release that the bank had found a material internal controls weakness vis-a-vis CDS marks, is probably rather critical. Of course, the market being as headline drive as it is, took the lack of further Libor clarity as an "all clear" and send the stock up 6%. That may well have been rather premature. Because as the NYT reports, criminal charges are coming, which may explain JPM's reticence to say much if anything while it is the subject of a multi-year long criminal investigation which is about to break.