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lindsey williams on JP Morgan $2 billion loss May 2012
When news broke of a 2 billion dollar trading loss by JP Morgan, much of the financial world was absolutely stunned. But the truth is that this is just the beginning. This is just a very small preview of what is going to happen when we see the collapse of the worldwide derivatives market. When most Americans think of Wall Street, they think of a bunch of stuffy bankers trading stocks and bonds.
But over the past couple of decades it has evolved into much more than that. Today, Wall Street is the biggest casino in the entire world.
Their Chief Investment Office made a series of trades which turned out horribly, and it resulted in a loss of over 2 billion dollars over the past 40 days. But 2 billion dollars is small potatoes compared to the vast size of the global derivatives market. It has been estimated that the the national value of all the derivatives in the world is somewhere between 600 trillion dollars and 1.5 quadrillion dollars.
Nobody really knows the real amount, but when this derivatives bubble finally bursts there is not going to be nearly enough money on the entire planet to fix things.
According to the Comptroller of the Currency, the "too big to fail" banks have exposure to derivatives that is absolutely mind blowing.
Just check out the following numbers from an official U.S. government report....
JPMorgan Chase -- $70.1 Trillion
Citibank -- $52.1 Trillion
Bank of America -- $50.1 Trillion
Goldman Sachs -- $44.2 Trillion
So a 2 billion dollar loss for JP Morgan is nothing compared to their total exposure of over 70 trillion dollars.
Overall, the 9 largest U.S. banks have a total of more than 200 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives. That is approximately 3 times the size of the entire global economy.
