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| CEO of JP Morgan (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
I’m not sure if it was the biggest (stock invest) quarterly loss of all time, but Merrill Lynch’s $16 billion loss in the fourth quarter of 2008 certainly ranks very high up there in the annals of investment-bank blowups. It happened after the bank had already been taken over by Bank of America, and it was in the middle of the financial crisis, so it didn’t get nearly the amount of attention it deserved. But it was not simply a case of assets plunging in value. Instead, it was, in very large part, a basis trade blowup.
The basis trade is an arbitrage, basically. There are two different ways the market measures credit risk: by looking at credit spreads — the yield on a certain issuer’s bonds, relative to the risk-free rate — or by looking at CDS spreads... Continue to read.
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