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Revision as of 04:27, 8 March 2011 by Manway (talk | contribs) (Remove timeline that contained a BLP violation)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Joseph Jett is the Managing Partner of Jett Capital Management. An expert in Private Equity and Alternative Investments, Jett has made numerous television appearances providing market commentary on such shows as CNN Moneyline, Your World with Neil Cavuto and Geraldo at Large with Geraldo Rivera.
Jett has authored two books about his life and experience in the financial markets. The first, "Black and White on Wall Street", was published by William Morrow & Company. The second, "Broken Bonds" was published by Cambridge Matrix Publications Kft.
In the early 1990's Jett was perhaps best known for his role in the Kidder Peabody trading loss in 1994. At the time of the loss it was the largest alleged trading fraud in history.
Jett's background
Joseph Jett grew up near Cleveland, Ohio. At age of 8, he began working as a paperboy. During high school he worked as a dishwasher and short order cook at a steakhouse. The son of a conservative businessman, Jett was a fan of Richard Nixon, worked in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 Presidential campaign and disdained affirmative action programs so much that he refused to identify his race on his application to the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. He was picked on by fellow blacks whom he constantly challenged to do better. In ninth grade, Jett stepped onto a basketball court at a city park and stole the ball proclaiming, "It's time that we as a people stop making baskets and start making A's!" He was beaten up for his efforts. To defend himself, he became a dedicated disciple of weightlifting and the martial arts.
Jett earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in Chemical Engineering at MIT and after working two years at GE Plastics went on to Harvard Business School. In his book Black and White, Joseph Jett states that his Harvard MBA degree was not awarded due to his failure to pay final college tuition, which he was not aware of, and which the New York Times reported in 1994. He finally paid for his tuition and was awarded his MBA degree in 1987. A confirmation from Emily Hayden, a Harvard MBA representative and the Harvard MBA school confirmed that Joseph Jett was indeed awarded a Harvard MBA in 1987. Jett was hired by Kidder, Peabody & Co in July 1991. At the time he was 33 years old. He had worked previously as a bond trader at Morgan Stanley for two years and at First Boston for eighteen months.
Kidder Peabody
In 1994, following a number of scandals and losses in the fixed income department, the investment bank Kidder, Peabody & Co. was sold to Paine Webber. On April 17, 1994, GE CEO Jack Welch identified Jett on CNBC as a rogue trader who had singlehandedly caused $250 million in losses.
Jett’s trading strategy
In his book "Black and White on Wall Street" Jett explained that his primary trading strategy was to trade in massive amounts to exploit an anomaly in the relation of cash bonds to their derivative futures market. Jett's trading position approached $50 Billion. The anomaly was caused by the Clinton administration's decision to have semi-annual rather than quarterly issues of the long bond.
For nine months, scarcity of the cash bond created a situation where the cheapest to deliver security into the futures market was a callable security with a duration of 9 years. Jett purchased the STRIP components of the cash bond with a 30 year duration and sold short futures against his cash holdings.
Jett argued to the NASD that his long cash profit's outweighed any loss from the shorter duration futures position and that his trades were profitable. Jett claimed that Kidder had forced the appearance of losses by redefining "unrealized profits" common to both Jett's forward trades and Kidder's CMO operation as "unrealizable profits" only for those trades in Jett's position.
Jett's STRIP trading was apparently quite profitable. The SEC ruled that as all of Jett's alleged losses were from the short futures position, which are not securities per se, that Jett was not guilty of securities fraud.
Kidder held that Jett's primary strategy was to exploit a flaw in Kidder's computer systems that made unprofitable trades appear profitable. The trades used in constructing the phony profits were forward reconstitutions of US Treasury bonds. The transaction is executed when a trader buys a set of treasury strips sufficient to re-create the original bond that they were derived from.
Kidder's system valued forward-dated transactions as if they were immediately settled, rather than taking into account the time value of money for the period before settlement of the trade. The method Jett followed was facilitated by this management approved accounting method. By buying US Treasury bond strips (whose price increases each day due to accretion), hedged by a short futures position (whose price remains relatively stable over the settlement period), Jett was able to book immediate, illusory profits. Once settlement of the trade happened, any false profits immediately were reversed as a loss. Therefore, in order to continue to appear profitable, Jett had to engage in more and more such trades, enough to both offset the losses on the settling trades plus additional trades to keep delivering profits. For the scheme to persist, the size had to continually grow, and this is what eventually brought the scheme's downfall. Jett's trading size had become so large that General Electric, the owner of Kidder Peabody at the time, asked that he cut the size of his positions because of the bloating of GE's balance sheet. With no new trades to offset those settling and rolling off, the losses became apparent to Kidder senior management.
Jett, who was previously a moderately profitable trader, started earning large bonuses once he began executing the trades that exploited the system flaw. While in 1991 Jett was paid a bonus of $5000, in 1992 and 1993 he was paid $2.1 million and $9.3 million respectively. The board of General Electric, who had owned Kidder Peabody since 1986, had to approve the $9.3 million outsized bonus in 1993. Later, in his autobiography "Straight from the Gut," Jack Welch would lament not personally looking into how one of his employees could become so successful so quickly.
The Lynch Report
As the scandal first came to light, Kidder Peabody hired lawyer Gary G. Lynch from the law firm of Davis, Polk & Wardwell, the former enforcement chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission, to conduct an internal investigation. The result was an 86 page document that became known as the Lynch Report. The report was released in August 1994 and concluded that Jett acted alone, but also blamed the losses on a complete breakdown of the system of supervision at Kidder, particularly with regard to Ed Cerullo and Melvin Mullin.
"Jett was provided the opportunity to generate false profits by trading and accounting systems," Mr. Lynch wrote. "It was his supervisors, however, who allowed Jett that opportunity for over two years because they never understood Jett's daily trading activity or the source of his apparent profitability. Instead, their focus was on profit and loss and risk-management data that provided no insight into the mechanics of Jett's trading."
The use of Gary Lynch to conduct the internal investigation was controversial, as he was also the lawyer hired by Kidder to represent the firm in its case against Jett, which raises questions about the impartiality of the investigation.
Handwritten notes by Davis Polk law firm partner Larry Portnoy, written after interviewing numerous Kidder executives, stated: “Not really false profits. Rather advanced profits. We didn’t view it as false. Just accelerated. So CF (Lead Accountant Charles Fiumefreddo) didn’t see it as a phony profit issue.
David Bernstein was assistant to Edward A. Cerullo, Kidder’s fixed-income chief. According to notes from an interview with lawyers for Kidder, Bernstein said that “Kidder can’t deny that 100-plus people knew that forward trades with Fed took place. Issue is it had P&L effect.” Other notes record him saying they were “not really false profits.”
Jett's post-Kidder career
Jett told The New York Times in 2004 that he gets between $4,000 and $8,000 per appearance on the lecture circuit.
He currently operates a firm called Jett Capital Management LLC.
In July 2008, the French news channel France 24 televised a feature following the Jerome Kerviel trading losses, which featured an extensive interview with Jett. In it, Jett said that because of legal costs he has no money left to pay the SEC fines, and that he was living in the basement of an ex-girlfriend's house in Princeton, New Jersey. The France24 reporter said that Jett is running a financial consultancy domiciled offshore, which conducts its business from hired conference suites in New Jersey. The show televised Jett meeting with a client who was trying to raise $9 million for a business venture. At the conclusion of the report, the commentator said she believed that Jett was trying to use the France 24 program to show the SEC that he has no money to pay the fines due, but this may have been Jett trying to manipulate France24 and the SEC.
References
- Ex-Street Big Snared in Domestic, SEC Battles New York Post, February 24, 2010
- IQPC Global Private Equity Summit NYC Feb. 17-18, 2011
- Joseph Jett Bibliography Amazon.com
- ^ In the Matter of Orlando Joseph Jett, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, March 5, 2004
- Ex-Street Big Snared in Domestic, SEC Battles New York Post, February 24, 2010
- "Brains and Brawn Of a Professed Nerd" New York Times; Jun 5, 1994
- "Brains and Brawn Of a Professed Nerd" New York Times; Jun 5, 1994
- Dramatic Rise and a Nasty Fall New York Times, April 22, 1994
- Harvard MBA degree verification
- "Did He or Didn't He", 60 Minutes aired 2-19-95
- Andrew Bary, “Kidder Had "Lax" Oversight of Jett? Looks More Like No Oversight”, Barron's, August 8, 1994
- ^ Initial Decision of an SEC Administrative Law Judge In the Matter of Orlando Joseph Jett Securities and Exchange Commission, July 21, 1998
- BEHIND THE KIDDER SCANDAL: THE OVERVIEW; Kidder Scandal Tied to Failure Of Supervision New York Times, August 5, 1994
- Gary Lynch, Defender of Companies, Has His Critics New York Times, September 3, 1996
- Paul Tharp, “Jett: Looks Like He's in the Clear”, The New York Post, June 20, 1996
- The Flimsy Case Against Joseph Jett Gary Weiss, Business Week, July 1, 1996
- Monsieur Kerviel, Don't Delay Work on New Career Susan Antilla, Bloomberg News, Feb 4 2009
- Joe Jett, a failed bet on Wall Street France24 Network, July 18, 2008
Also see List of Trading Losses
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