Case study-Kidder Peabody
The activities of a single trader, Jpseph Jett, led to this New York investment dealer losing $350 million trading US government securities. The loss arose because of a mistake in the way the company’s computer system calculated profits.
2 to 4 single-spaced, font size 12, Times New Roman pages answering the questions below, excluding tables and figures, if any.
1. Describe the case. How the institution incurred such big losses?
a. Describe the positions taken by the institution or trader.
b. Describe how the institution or the trader expected to profit or what risks they wanted to hedge.
c. Why losses occurred? Describe the mechanism and timing of losses.
2. Describe the outcome of the losses.
a. How traders were disciplined?
b. Did the institution go bankrupt? If not, did it recover afterwards in terms of profitability or market capitalization?
3. What can be learned from the case?
a. Describe measures suggested to prevent the recurrence of similar losses in the future.
b. Were suggested measures implemented at the institution or elsewhere?
c. In your view is it realistic to implement these measures in the future? What interests or factors would work for or against these measures?
Use information from your sources without quoting them verbatim. Provide descriptions in your own words, but reference the sources as needed. If you must quote a sentence or two from a source use quotation marks and cite the source in the footnotes. Also you cannot use articles of on-line encyclopedias (such as Wikipedia,
Investopedia and others) as a source for your answers, but you can use the sources cited by the encyclopedias articles, if they are useful. Use high quality and reputable sources for your project.