Banco Popular de Puerto Rico

Banco Popular de Puerto Rico is a full-service financial services provider with operations in Puerto Rico, the United States and Virgin Islands. Popular, Inc. is the largest banking institution by both assets and deposits in Puerto Rico, and in the United States Popular, Inc.

Latest News
  • Receiving Wide Coverage ...The Punchin' Jamie Show: This weekend the news was all JPMorgan and Jamie Dimon fallout, all the time. We expect pretty much the same through Tuesday, when the bank's annual meeting is scheduled. Once again the only sane way we can think of to summarize the deluge of information, analysis and pontification is to break it down by theme. Take a deep breath, folks, here we go again...

    May 14
  • Receiving Wide Coverage ...JPMorgan (What Else?): One more time, we’ll break it down for you thematically.

    May 15
  • Receiving Wide Coverage ...Your Daily Dose of Dimon: The financial media is running out of whale-related puns, but JPMorgan news is still dominating your Morning Scanner's browser tabs like Bruno Iksil cornering the corporate credit default swap index market. To preserve our sanity and yours, we've been organizing our summaries of each day's developments by theme. Without further ado…

    May 16
  • Receiving Wide Coverage ...Another JPMorgasbord: And we’re still breaking it down into digestible portions for you.

    May 17
  • Receiving Wide Coverage ...The JPM-a-Thon Goes On: Fans of slow-motion car wrecks will take a certain pleasure in the sting of nasty news that seems to be pulling JPMorgan Chase (JPM) inexorably closer to calamity — political, if not economic. It turns out the same London Chief Investment Office that wracked up the $2 billion loss so much in the news is, separately, sitting on $100 billion (yes, billion with a "B") of risky bonds, reports the Financial Times. The funny-coloured paper says the holdings are part of a deliberate 2009 move that JPM's CIO made out of safer assets, such as U.S. Treasuries, to increase returns and diversify investments. The bank's CIO has been "the biggest buyer of European mortgage-backed bonds and other complex debt securities, such as collateralised loan obligations in all markets for three years." That's according to "more than a dozen senior traders and credit experts" cited by the FT. "I can't see how they could unwind these positions because no one can replace them in terms of size," a trader is quoted as saying. "It's a bit of the same problem they face with the derivatives trade. They pretty much are the market." Translation: good luck getting out of these babies. Adding to the sense of disarray and mismanagement, JPM didn't have a treasurer in place during a five-month period when its CIO placed trades that led to the more than $2 billion in losses, according to the Wall Street Journal. Normally, the treasurer would play a critical role in managing the firm's balance sheet, capital, funding and liquidity and working closely with heads of all lines of business, it notes. Worse, at least as far as how it sounds, the executive put in charge of risk management for the CIO in February had little experience and is the brother-in-law of another top bank executive, the Journal reports. If all that weren't enough for one day, there's that item at the top of the Journal's front page with the inside-JPM tick-tock account of events leading up to its $2 billion bombshell. The tale is replete with Jamie Dimon "barking" and tossing documents (Quick: Who's going to play Jamie in the movie?), as well as internal debates about what to make public and when. Where Wall Street blunders occur, of course, politicians are sure to follow. The Senate Banking Committee said Thursday that it will ask Dimon to testify as early as next month. That same committee is separately holding a round of Dodd-Frank hearings involving JPM's regulators, including the Federal Reserve, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Securities and Exchange Commission. Separately, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan and Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrats who authored the Volcker Rule, used a Thursday call with reporters urge fellow lawmakers to close the "JP Morgan Loophole" that presumably permitted its ill-fated trades. The news of Dimon's upcoming testimony follows press reports (from anonymous sources, of course) that the U.S. Justice Department and several regulators have already opened probes. JPM's losses, meanwhile, have continued to build by as much as $150 million a day since last week's announcement and could eventually total more than $5 billion, according to the Journal. If J.P. Morgan could mess up, what about Citigroup (NYSE:C) , Bank of America (BAC), Morgan Stanley (MS) or Goldman Sachs (GS)? asks the Journal's Heard column. Somewhere out there, the hedge fund masters on the other side of the JPM's trades are undoubtedly sizing up bigger yachts.

    May 18
  • Receiving Wide Coverage ...Your JPMorgan Minute: Irvin Goldman, recently “relieved of his duties” (the Journal’s words) as chief risk officer at JPMorgan’s chief investment office after the $2 billion-and-counting blowup, has prior experience with trading losses. In 2008, he blew at least $10 million during a prior job at the bank as a trader, the Journal reports today. And before he joined JPMorgan, he was fired (the Journal uses the “f” word in this instance) from Cantor Fitzgerald in 2007 after the MBS unit he ran lost $30 million. And JPMorgan put him on leave eight months after he joined, while the NYSE’s electronic trading arm investigated his trading while at Cantor. He had been day trading certain securities for his own personal account that he was also trading with the firm’s money. (Cantor settled the probe for $250,000.) Of course, one learns by making mistakes, so perhaps JPMorgan could argue that these expensive blunders might have given Mr. Goldman an appropriately jaundiced eye for risks (both the market and regulatory kind), and thus justified giving him the CRO role, despite his reportedly scant experience with risk management. The fact that he is the brother-in-law of JPM’s head of corporate regulatory affairs might undermine such an argument, though. … A Times story reports that Ina Drew, JPM’s recently relieved chief investment officer, “began to lose her grip” on the unit a couple years ago after a medical issue necessitated her frequent absences from the workplace. With Drew less involved in the day-to-day, her underlings in New York clashed with their London counterparts over the latter camp’s increasingly risky trades. The Londoners prevailed, apparently through sheer will. Achilles Macris, the direct supervisor of the “London Whale” trader Bruno Iksil, comes off in this story as, well, a heel. … The Journal’s “Heard on the Street” column asks some disquieting questions about JPMorgan’s fiddling with its value-at-risk model during the first quarter: “Had the trade gone bad and someone didn't want the Var model to start alerting others to rising risk?” … The Times’ “DealBook” says the CFTC has joined the SEC and FBI in opening a preliminary investigation into the JPMorgan trading loss. … Politico’s Ben White reports that CFTC chief Gary Gensler will cite the JPM mess in a speech today on cross-border application of reforms to the swaps market. … In case you missed Paul Krugman’s Times column last week, in which he said the JPM loss shows the need for tougher regulation, his column this week says the JPM loss shows the need for tougher regulation. … Finally, though it’s not directly related to the beaching of the Whale, JPMorgan has returned $178 million to the bankruptcy trustee for MF Global. This cash was posted as collateral to JPM, which was MF Global’s lead bank, during the commodities brokerage’s waning days. The FT says the $178 million is not a part of that missing $1 billion-plus, which is evidently still missing.

    May 21
  • Receiving Wide Coverage ...Eating JPMorgan's Lunch: By now we've all read or heard about Mitt Romney's quote to the effect that if JPMorgan lost $2 billion, someone else made $2 billion. But who were those fortunate counterparties? The Journal reports that "about a dozen banks," including Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, have either directly or indirectly profited from JPM's soured trading positions. The article also identifies a handful of hedge funds that made money off the London Whale's miscalculations. Interestingly, Citigroup tells the Journal on the record that it didn't score gains from JPM's wrong bets. Meanwhile, Bloomberg News interviews the manager of one of the hedge funds that took the other side of a credit derivative trade from JPM. He tells the wire service his counterparty's losses could get worse — "if we end up with a catastrophe in Europe in the short run, they're probably not positions that anyone would want to have" — but adds he's "not looking to try and cause them any problem." It's not personal, Jamie, it's strictly business.

    May 22
  • Receiving Wide Coverage ...More Morgan: Elephants indeed. Republicans on Capitol Hill have never forgotten that JPMorgan funneled the majority of its political donations to the Democrats in the 2008 campaign season, and though the firm has since stepped up its Republican giving, GOP lawmakers' patience with Dimon & Co. is wearing thin, the Wall Street Journal reports. Aside from the sour grapes, some Republicans worry that their efforts to roll back new financial regulations were made moot by JPMorgan's massive trading loss. "The argument that Volcker was absurd was building—greatly—and then this happened," says as unnamed Republican on the House Financial Services panel. … The Financial Times suggests that the JPM fallout will direct regulators' attention to the whole concept of portfolio hedging by banks (just in case the regulators needed a little extra nudging here). … The FT also has anointed the next likely successor to Dimon: he's 41-year-old Matt Zames, Ina Drew's replacement as head of the bank's chief investment office, and Dimon says he's the kind of fellow you'd want to share a foxhole with. … Also in the FT, JPM has retained the services of WilmerHale attorney William McLucas, a former director of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission. … Over at the New York Times, the continued fallout over the JPM loss made for a good occasion to reconsider the raison d'être for big banks. The analysis piece argues that the financial industry's direct contribution to the broader economy is overstated, because the primary output measurement is based on the interest they charge for credit — something that has a habit of increasing when appetite for yield leads to increased risk-taking. … And Washington Post opinion writer Dana Milbank, reporting on Tuesday's appearance by Commodity Futures Trading Commission head Gary Gensler and other regulators before the Senate Banking Committee, says that JPM earned a "healthy dividend" on the $20 million it has spent on lobbying and campaign contributions in the past three years. He argues it's the regulators, not JPM executives, who are taking the heat from politicians over the firm's big trading loss.

    May 23
  • Receiving Wide Coverage ...JPMorgan: The FT analyzes JPMorgan's regulatory filings and infers that the bank takes more risk when investing excess liquidity — that is, cash that isn't being loaned out — than its megabank counterparts. Government-guaranteed bonds make up a smaller percentage of JPM's securities portfolio than at other large banks, for example. However, one FT reader protests in the comment thread that the conclusion trumpeted in the headline — "JPMorgan Takes More Risk than Rivals" — is overstated: "If you have a bigger securities portfolio and have excess liquidity then it wouldn't be unusual to buy corporate bonds. If your competitor has instead loaned to corporate customers, rather than buying bonds, then your balance sheet isn't riskier." (If this discussion gives you déjà vu, it may be because several hours before the FT posted its story yesterday, American Banker published an analysis by our data editor Harry Terris that similarly compared JPM's bond holdings to those of its competitors, and found the latter to more vanilla.) In the Journal, the "Heard on the Street" column identifies a pitfall of the portfolio hedging involved in JPM's recent $2 billion trading loss: fluctuations in the value of the hedges (if they are hedges — that's a matter of debate) flow through to earnings even when moves in the value of the assets being hedged don't. This "asymmetric accounting" (CEO Jamie Dimon's phrase) makes the true performance of the bank more opaque, even to its managers, the column says.

    May 24
  • Receiving Wide Coverage ...JPMorgan: The bank’s Chief Investment Office has been under the media microscope ever since the first stories emerged about the London Whale’s risky derivative trades last month. Today a front-page Journal story focuses the lens on the Special Investment Group, a team within the CIO that makes equity investments in distressed companies. This would seem an odd activity for a group within the CIO, whose job is ostensibly to manage risk, and the story says Matt Zames, the office’s new chief, is reconsidering whether the SIG belongs there. But later on in the story, there’s a quote from an SIG employee’s LinkedIn page that explains the group “seeks to take controlling stakes in companies J.P. Morgan has lent money to and are experiencing some degree of financial distress." So maybe you could argue that trying to get some upside in a bad situation where JPM is already exposed as a lender is a form of risk management? Though you could also argue it’s potentially throwing good money after bad. In any event, JPMorgan tells the Journal that the SIG doesn’t invest FDIC-insured deposits; the group is funded with debt and equity issued at the holding company level. In the Times, columnist Peter Eavis argues that JPMorgan doesn’t disclose enough about its hedges, value at risk measures, and other things investors would probably want to know right now. Also in the Times, economist Simon Johnson joins others in calling for JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon to step down from the board of the New York Fed. Johnson considers both sides of the issue at length, but he feels so strongly that Dimon should resign from the Fed board that he’s drafted an online petition.

    May 25

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