New York Times online today is rerunning a story I read some weeks back: That JPMorgan Chase exited its own money from the hedge funds connected with Madoff and did not alert customers to the same. It faces lawsuits on that score .
JPMorgan Chase, the banking giant, is bracing for lawsuits over the Madoff affair, after admitting that it pulled its own money out of hedge funds linked to the Wall Street swindler while leaving hundreds of European clients exposed.
Those clients have lost at least an estimated $30m (£21m) after the former Nasdaq chairman Bernard Madoff was revealed to be running the largest Ponzi scheme in history.
JPMorgan bankers in London created $136m of complex derivatives that allowed investors to bet on the performance of two Connecticut hedge funds, whose steady profits had become the envy of the industry.
The funds, run by Fairfield Greenwich, a firm founded by a long-time associate of Mr Madoff, Walter Noel, had been channelling money to Mr Madoff.
JPMorgan bought Indymac also. A funny thing happened to my bank stocks on my way to California–Indymac was about to be shuttered. I had, get this, bought some shares of Indymac on a whim and a rec from online somebody. I was actually in California when the announcement came that Indymac had failed. No biggie I thought.
When I got home weeks later, I checked my stocks and hell, Heloise had bought Indymac stocks and forgot about it. They were since delisted because they went to zero. But JPM bought the bank, and gave stock holders like me JPM stock instead. Not bad, I thought. And within two weeks JPM stock shot up to 51.00 per share.
What did Heloise do? She went online and sold all her JPM shares.
That time I took the bank instead of it taking me. Banks are more devious than you know. I was buying stocks (around 2000) back when Bank One was still around. They sold me THEIR worthless stocks. I was paying way too much for something worthless.
I was smart though: I would check the stock market for these mutual funds and kept tracking that they were losing pennies on the stock, daily, but in a steady trickle out the door.
I bought the stocks for about a year. Then I decided that they were no good. I went in and cancelled the withdrawals and got my money back. Then within maybe two years the stocks for Bank One that they were selling and I was buying were rated as worthless!
Then per history Bank One was bought by Bank of America–I think. So, they were bought out and sold out the worthless stock without one word to the wise who would have followed suit.
Once again Heloise’s gut told her right–sell that crap and NEVER buy banks stocks from a bank again ever! Damn I’m smart.
Heloise
