Morgan Stanley reveals nearly $1B loss from Archegos implosion
Reuters, 16 April 2021
Morgan Stanley lost nearly $1 billion from the collapse of family office Archegos Capital Management, the bank said Friday, muddying its 150 percent jump in first-quarter profit that was powered by a boom in trading and deal-making.
Morgan Stanley was one of several banks that had exposure to Archegos, which defaulted on margin calls late last month and triggered a fire sale of stocks across Wall Street. Continue reading “Article: Morgan Stanley reveals nearly $1B loss from Archegos implosion”
(The Senate is expected to confirm Gary Gensler as the new chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, and crypto assets — including bitcoin — are likely high on his agenda.
Markets were shaken but unstirred by the collapse of Greensill and the Archegos unwind trades. Credit Suisse is the ultimate loser of the two scandals – reputationally damaged and holed below the water line. The bank is paying the price of years of flawed management, poor risk awareness. and its self-belief it was still a Tier 1 global player. Its’ challenge is to avoid becoming the Deutsche Bank of Switzerland – which it will struggle to do without a radical and unlikely shakeout. 
In the aftermath of the Archegos blow up, the biggest nightmare on Wall Street – where there is never just one cockroach – is that (many) more Archegos-style, highly levered “family office” blow ups are waiting just around the corner.
The collapse of UK-based supply chain finance firm Greensill Capital continues to reverberate. In Germany the private banking association has paid out around €2.7 billion to more than 20,500 Greensill Bank customers as part of its deposit guarantee scheme after the bank collapsed in early March. But the deposits of institutional investors such as other financial institutions, investment firms, and local authorities are not covered. Fifty municipalities are believed to be nursing losses of at least €500 million. 
Goldman Sachs managed to avoid billions of dollars in potential losses from the implosion of highly levered hedge fund Archegos Capital Management by breaking ranks with other syndicate banks to dump large blocks of shares representing Archegos’s exposure to a coterie of tech and media names. When the dust settled, the bank told shareholders any losses would be insignificant, while Credit Suisse, the bank with perhaps the biggest exposure, said Tuesday it has booked a nearly $5 billion loss. 
The hits keep coming for investment banking giant Credit Suisse. 
ZURICH (Reuters) -Credit Suisse said on Tuesday it will take a 4.4 billion Swiss franc ($4.7 billion) hit from dealings with Archegos Capital Management, prompting it to overhaul the leadership of its investment bank and risk division.
As more details from the now infamous debacle surrounding Tiger cub Archegos, whose massive derivative-based exposures spilled out into the open and transformed into the biggest and most painful rolling margin call to hit Wall Street since Lehman, we now know that at least six Prime Brokers scrambled to unwind the biggest hedge fund blowup since LTCM without hammering the overall market.