Investment banks are in the business of taking calculated risks. Risk management infrastructure facilitates the safe pursuit of profits and the balancing of associated risks. By 2006, Lehman Brothers was thought to have a very respectable risk management system, and even its regulator, the...

The Net Stable Funding Ratio (NSFR), a liquidity standard introduced by Basel III, seeks to promote a better match between the liquidity of a bank’s assets and the manner in which the bank funds those assets.  The NSFR requires banks to maintain a minimum amount of funding deemed “stable”...

In December 2011, the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer of JPMorgan Chase (JPM) instructed the bank’s Chief Investment Office to reduce the size of its Synthetic Credit Portfolio (SCP) during 2012, so that JPM could decrease its Risk-Weighted Assets as the bank prepared to...

From the earliest efforts to mandate the amount of capital banks must maintain, regulators have grappled with how best to accomplish this task. Until the 1980s, regulation had been based largely on discretion and judgment. In the wake of two bank failures, the central bank governors of the G10...

When it filed for bankruptcy protection in September 2008, Lehman Brothers was an active participant in the derivatives market and was party to 906,000 derivative transactions of all types under 6,120 ISDA Master Agreements with an estimated notional value of $35 trillion. The majority of...

On April 13, 2012, JPMorgan Chase (JPM) Chief Financial Officer Douglas Braunstein took part in a conference call to discuss the bank’s first quarter 2012 earnings.  Coming just a week after media reports first questioned the risks taken by JPM derivatives trader Bruno Iksil, Braunstein made...

After consistently producing positive results through 2011, the JPMorgan Chase (JPM) traders who oversaw the bank’s Synthetic Credit Portfolio (SCP) grew alarmed by a consistent string of losses beginning in January 2012.  (The SCP was maintained by JPM to help hedge default risk and was the...

Anton R. Valukas, the Lehman Brothers court-appointed bankruptcy examiner, produced a 2,200-page report detailing possible claims that the estate might pursue, and he identified several, from company officers to its independent auditors. The most startling revelation of the report, however, was...

One of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s responses to the global financial crisis of 2007-2009 was to introduce the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR), a short-term measure that evaluates whether a bank has enough liquidity to meet expected cash outflows during a 30-day stress...

When Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008, it was the largest such filing in U.S. history and a huge shock to the world’s financial markets, which were already stressed from the deflated housing bubble and questions about subprime mortgages. Lehman was the fourth-largest...