Wall Street Proprietary Trading Goes Under Cover: Michael Lewis

[Joanne98]

Commentary by Michael Lewis

Oct. 27 (Bloomberg) -- A few weeks ago we asked a simple question: Why are the same Wall Street banks that lobbied so hard to dilute the passages in the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul bill banning proprietary trading now jettisoning their proprietary trading groups, without so much as a whimper?

The law directs regulators to study the prop trading ban for another 15 months before deciding how to enforce it: why is Wall Street caving now?

The many answers offered by Wall Street insiders in response boil down to a simple sentence: The banks have no intention of ceasing their prop trading. They are merely disguising the activity, by giving it some other name.

A former employee of JPMorgan, for instance, wrote to say that the unit he recently worked for, called the Chief Investment Office, advertised itself largely as a hedging operation but was in fact making massive bets with JPMorgan’s capital. And it would of course continue to do so. JPMorgan didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The fullest explanation came from a former Lehman Brothers corporate bond salesman named Robert Wosnitzer, who is now at New York University, writing a dissertation on the history of proprietary trading. He’s been interviewing Wall Street bond traders, he said, and they have been surprisingly open about their intentions to exploit one obvious loophole in the new law.

The innocent eye might have trouble spotting this loophole. The Dodd-Frank bill bans proprietary trading (Page 245: “Unless otherwise provided in this section, a banking entity shall not engage in proprietary trading”) and then appears to make it clear what that means (Page 565: “The term ‘proprietary trading’ means the act of a (big Wall Street bank) investing as a principal in securities, commodities, derivatives, hedge funds, private equity firms, or such other financial products or entities as the comptroller general may determine”).

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[dixiegrrrrl]

1. I love the way Lewis explains complicated issues so clearly.

Ty for posting.

[northernlights]

2. why am I not surprised? nt