Friday, January 26, 2018

The Volcker Rule: Taking in Water on Proprietary Trading

Under the Dodd-Frank financial reform law of 2010, Goldman Sachs had to break up its principal strategies group, the trading unit that had been very profitable. Goldman was considering several options, including moving the traders to another division or shutting the unit altogether. Morgan Stanley was considering ceding control of its $7 billion hedge fund firm, FrontPoint Partners. At Citigroup, executives had sold hedge fund and private equity businesses and were discussing reducing proprietary trading, which relies on a bank’s own capital to make bets in the financial markets. JPMorgan Chase had already begun dismantling its stand-alone proprietary trading desk and was modifying the structure of some investments of One Equity Partners, its internal private equity business. “This is the real stuff,” said Brad Hintz, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “It shows that if you squeeze Wall Street, like a balloon it will come out somewhere else, and we really are squeezing Wall Street. Their business models are changing.”

The complete essay is at "The Volcker Rule."