Courtesy of Pam Martens
Shanghai’s Bull Statue on Its Bund Waterfront (left); Bull Statue in Lower Manhattan (right)
The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 469.6 points yesterday for a loss of 2.84 percent but Wall Street banks and trading firms took a far heavier bruising. Business media have been placing the blame for global stock market convulsions on China’s slowing economy, devaluation of its currency and seemingly unstoppable selloffs in its wildly inflated stock market. There would seem to be much more to this story than we know so far to explain the outsized fall in Wall Street bank stocks.
Yesterday, with the Dow losing 2.84 percent, the major names on Wall Street fared as follows: Citigroup, down 4.75 percent; Bank of America, down 4.65 percent; Wells Fargo, down 4.39 percent; JPMorgan Chase, down 4.13 percent; Morgan Stanley, down 3.86 percent; and Goldman Sachs, down 3.44 percent. The Blackstone Group, a private equity firm with significant involvement in China, lost 5.26 percent.
These outsized losses versus the Dow’s performance are becoming the norm among the Wall Street banks. In just three trading sessions on Thursday, August 20, Friday, August 21 and Monday, August 24, JPMorgan Chase lost 10.87 percent of its market cap or $27.18 billion. Despite JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon’s serial reminders of the bank’s “fortress balance sheet,” the market is unconvinced. One has to ask why.
One explanation making the rounds on Wall Street is that even if some of these Wall Street mega banks don’t have a lot of direct exposure to China, they do have a lot of direct exposure to loans they have made to countries and corporate customers who depend on China for earnings. China is the largest buyer of industrial commodities in the world and its economic slowdown and attendant collapse in commodity prices – from oils to metals to agricultural products – is making repayment of loans to banks look riskier.
The major Wall Street banks also have Prime Brokerage relationships with the major hedge funds, a fancy way of saying they provide margin and loans of securities for risky trading. A growing number of hedge funds have been taking a pounding as trading becomes more erratic.
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