Chump Change
Really, these banks : a "rogue" trader in "Delta One" blows $2 B from the UBS balance sheet. This is a shitload of money for one guy even with the billions and trillions sloshing around to save our banks and i bankers. Since you asked BTW : Delta One creates securities that allow retail clients to instantly trade indices or other underlying assets like gold or shares, as closely as possible, which is not easy to do for the average punter. The banks responsible for hedging these exposures (hence , balance sheet exposure). The profit is made from the hedges and margins or fees from clients. If the trade goes wrong, or the hedge not applied, the bank can lose a lot of money. The only good news from the UBS debacle is, once again, it suggests that i banks should be separated from commercial banks.
Three years ago Lehman went under. Three other banks failed, too : Citibank, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS. Without government intervention, our economy would have stopped, ie, we would not have had an economy. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
