Even while on occasion contributing to it, I’ve been a little dubious of the Jamie-Dimon-steers-JPMorgan-safely-through-the-mortgage-debacle story line that has been emerging in recent weeks. I mean, there have got to be lots more mortgage-related losses coming at every big bank, right? Even the Great Dimon can’t avert that. But on the subway this morning I was reading the excellent Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation by Rick Bookstaber, who among many other things used to be head of risk management at Salomon Brothers, and came across this passage:
Jamie Dimon wasn’t buying any more of Mark Franklin’s Russia story. Leaning into Franklin, the Salomon Smith Barney co-CEO held his hand up in the air, with his thumb and forefinger nearly touching. “By our next meeting,” he ordered, “I want our Russia exposure down to this.”
This was in June 1998. Bookstaber writes:
On August 17 Russia simultaneously devalued its currency, defaulted on most of its government debt, and declared a moratorium on the payment of principal to foreigners. … From that point in early June when Dimon issued his decree until the Russian crisis hit in late August, our gross trading inventory of Russian debt dropped from nearly $3 billion to a tenth of that amount and our Russian ruble exposure was cut by 80 percent.
Has he really done it again?