Financial Disasters

8 important questions on Financial Disasters

What is the fundamental goal of risk management?

Avoid the types of disasters that can threaten the viability of a firm. This includes cases of misled information to management/investors, unexpectedly large market moves, fiduciary or reputational exposure to customers.

What happend at Chase Manhattan Bank/Drysale (1976)?

Chase believed it was only acting as an agent on these transactions, but legal documentation did not support this claim. How? Utilizing a weakness in markets, losing the borrowed money, very large proportions of positions.

Lesson: clear documentation, limits on size of bond positions, good measures for collateral lending.

What happened to Kidder Peabody (1994)?

A series of trades that were incorrectly reported in the firm's accounting system artifically inflated profits. A correction to these reported gains needed to be made. How? Due to a failure of the system to take into account present values of forward transactions. Both size and lengt of forward were increased to magnify the accounting error (hypothetical profits).

Lesson: Always investigate a large stream of unexpected profits (or losses) thoroughly and make sure to understand the source.
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What happened to Barings Bank (1995)?

Unauthorized trading activities by Nick Leeson, who happened to be in charge of trades and settlements (back-office). He took positions by made up fictiuous customers, on which he booked losses when necessary. Flaw was the management but also the lack of integration between systems (credit had to charge these fictious customers).

Lesson: absolute need of independent trading back office, inquiries about unexpected losses/profits, inquiries on large unanticipated moves of cash. Don't forget to compare gross and net positions.

What happened at UBS (1997, 1998)?

Controversy on poor decision making or improper control structure. 1998 was LTCM. No proper management oversight on EQ Derivatives. Head of analytics was also in charge of business decisions. Moreover compensation was tied to trading results. Modelling deficiencies. Off market prices.

Lesson: independent oversight.

What happens in disaster of large market moves?

Most important: liquidity comes at stake. Basic question: why are positions not closed out? Answer: simply because there is no market, no buyer so no market liquidity.

What happened to Bankers Trust (1994), reputational damage?

Claims of customers to be misled in entering in complex derivatives structures. Course of legal discovery was costly but most important damaging the reputation. Problem: probable but small reduce in financing costs, but in exchange for a potentially large loss under less probable circumstances.

Not tailored to the needs of customers (objective was to reduce). Complexity of the structure, also to prevent shopping at other banks. Bad language of employees about client came out (arrogance and insulting).

What happened to JP Morgan, Citi, and Enron?

Oil derivatives that when cancelled out the oil part were just loans. Enron could therefore book these are derivatives instead of a loan. Although JP Morgan and Citi threated these as loans in their books (not deceived own investors), they helped to commit a fraud as they clearly knew Enron's intentions.

Lesson: new controls in place to ascertain that their clients accounting for derivatives transactions with them in ways that were transparant to investors.

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