NEW YORK (Reuters) – Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker said JPMorgan Chase’s recent multibillion-dollar trading loss may show that the nation’s largest banks are too big to manage.
JPMorgan (JPM.N) revealed last month that its London office had executed a failed hedging strategy that has so far produced at least $2 billion in trading losses.
The news has rattled Wall Street and Washington and raised questions about whether banks are still taking too many risks following the 2007-2009 financial crisis.
“Maybe this JPMorgan thing is an illustration that these(banks) are really too big to manage,” Volcker said on Thursday at an American Bankers Association event at Columbia University in New York. “There are so many things going on at these banks.”
The Volcker rule, named for Volcker – who has advocated for banks to become less complex and interconnected – would ban banks from making speculative bets with their own funds if they enjoy federal guarantees.
He said on Thursday that the failed trading strategy at JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office is “the antithesis of the kind of ethic and approach we want to take in banking.”
(Reporting by Lauren Tara LaCapra. Editing by Bernadette Baum)
