Posts Tagged ‘ Maureen Miskovic ’

JPMorgan 24601

May 16, 2012
JPMorgan 24601

Many of us are familiar with Jean Valjean, the protagonist from Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables, made more famous in the 80s thanks to the musical of the same name. In the story, Monsieur Valjean is sent to a prison camp for stealing a loaf of bread: 5 years for the crime and 14 more for attempted escapes. Jump forward 200 years and people are no longer stealing bread but generating losses on a much larger scale for their financial institutions. Last year it was $2 billion and UBS and today it is $2 billion at JPMorgan (which appears to…

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Oswald Grübel’s moment of wrongness

September 23, 2011

I just had the pleasure of watching author Kathryn Schulz’s TED video about being wrong. As I watched I couldn’t help thinking about Oswald Grübel’s “moment of wrongness”: when he learned about UBS’s $2 billion trading loss. Last November Grübel went on record saying “Risk is our business. I can assure you, as long as I’m here, as long as my colleagues are here, we do know about risks.” Schulz would probably submit that at the time Grübel made that assertion he genuinely felt very right about UBS’s risk management capabilities. His belief reflected his reality. It seems “we feel very…

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They will always find a way to screw you

September 20, 2011

I worked about six shifts at a Burger King in a shopping mall when I was in my teens. I quit because I didn’t care much for wearing the brown pants and hairnet. On my final night, the closing shift, I helped the veterans take the trash out. When we got to the Dumpster my colleagues ripped open a trash bags and pulled out a sealed bag that included dozens of Muppet Babies toys which they smuggled out of the store. Despite the manager’s belief that he had controls that were “watertight as possible” if your employees want to screw…

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CEO Oswald Gruebel reacts to UBS fraud [humour]

September 17, 2011

Here is a reenactment of how UBS CEO Oswald Gruebel reacted when he learned about the $2 billion fraud. (That is Colin Firth portraying Gruebel on the left.) http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DxJvGE7Vvd4M

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Risk management is neither the cause nor the solution to UBS’s problems

September 16, 2011

A headline today on CBC.ca reads “UBS case latest failure of risk management”. I think I will spend the rest of the day being offended by the CBC. (All will be forgiven if Amanda Lang appears on the National tonight.) Despite all the systems, oversight, controls, compliance, supervision and some other sixth thing, you can’t stop the rogue trader. Adoboli is to blame. His boss is to blame. Maybe culture or performance objectives are to blame. But risk management is not. Saying Risk Management is to blame is like saying the police department should be blamed for a teen committing…

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Bad day to be chief risk officer at UBS

September 15, 2011

Blessed are the risk managers: for they shall be called sons of God.                                                                                           -  Riskczar 5:9 One can only imagine the profanity and f-words that spewed from the mouth of Maureen Miskovic, the new Chief Risk Officer at UBS, when she learned about the $2 billion rogue trading hit at UBS. I bet she made Carol Bartz look like a Ned Flanders. It’s still too soon to know who knew what and when, but as Simon Morris explained in a Reuters article, the root cause is likely insufficient supervision: “No rogue trader works in a vacuum, and UBS’s management…

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Risk managers are like janitors

October 21, 2009

This is a bit of a re-post but it seems appropriate following a comment I received earlier where the reader asks: “How can you convince a small business owner to invest resources into something that they cannot see a value in?” For years I have been saying that being a risk manager is like being a janitor (with all due respect to the hard working men and women who clean up after the rest of us.) I can say this from experience because I often felt like the janitor. I built processes and controls, formal and informal, managed relationships with…

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