The City trader at the centre of a $2bn trading loss at JP Morgan Chase had returned to his home in Paris on Friday as the repercussions of the loss spread across the markets.
Some $13bn was wiped off the value of America’s largest bank after it admitted the scale of the trading activities of Bruno Iksil – nicknamed the London Whale for his bullish trading – and his colleagues in the bank’s little known “chief investment office”. The US Securities and Exchange financial watchdog was said to have begun reviewing the losses, the rating agency Standard & Poor’s revised its outlook on the bank from stable to negative and Fitch Ratings downgraded it from A-plus to AA-minus.
Contacted by the Guardian, Iksil was reluctant to comment. He was thought to be in Paris and said: “I cannot talk about it. You will have to speak to the bank’s representatives.”
The banker, who is understood to be married with four children, spends Monday to Thursday in London, staying in a flat in Earls Court, returning to France on Fridays. According to his profile on the Bloomberg trading platform, he says he is “walking over water and humble”.
A graduate in engineering from the École Centrale in Paris 20 years ago, Iksil had become so well known in the opaque $10tn market for credit default swaps – a complex type of insurance product – that he was nicknamed the “London Whale” and also known as Voldemort, after Harry Potter’s nemesis.
Iksil is thought to be one of the highest-paid bankers in London and his New York-based boss, Ina Drew, whose pay has to be published, received $14m last year.
The Financial Services Authority has been informed and will liaise closely with the bank, which had earned an unrivalled reputation for navigating successfully through the 2008 banking crisis.
Before the shock announcement, JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon had been crucial in persuading the US government to water down new regulations, in particular the so-called Volcker rule that aims to limit risk-taking by banks considered “too big to fail”.
read rest at: http://2012indyinfo.com/2012/05/12/jp-morgan-trader-london-whale-blows-13bn-hole-in-banks-value-business-the-guardian/
