Suicide Wave within the Financial Sphere

A series of six suicides in several days has started to worry the world of finance. When a few traders in their 30s defenestrate themselves, the fear of a new stock market crash makes the financial sphere tremble.

It is JP Morgan, the American behemoth with an annual balance sheet neighboring the French gross domestic product, which faces the heaviest hecatomb. On Tuesday, a 33-year-old trader defenestrated himself from his office in Honk Kong. A few days earlier the manager of JP Morgan’s trading department committed suicide. And just before that, at the investment bank’s London headquarters, the suicide of a vice president.

In the London financial district, the City, a representative of Deutsche Bank did himself in with a nail gun. Two other bankers, in high-profile positions with the investment bank Russell, have also made lethal jumps.

This series of suicides worries the financial sphere. The series of 11 traders who had committed suicide a few weeks prior to the 1929 stock market crash has left a vivid memory. Must we see in these six suicides the omen of a financial meltdown? The Financial Post is perplexed and has announced that Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse and other major banks have sent messages to their young traders to encourage them to relax. Pinpointing which sector might initiate the stock market crash remains impossible. The bankers who have committed suicide are high-ranking people, with the exception of the last death, a trader on the Forex market (short for Foreign Exchange), where national currency is traded.

Some people have brought to the fore another explanation for these suicides, notably the ones that occurred in the City and are related to the Libor scandal. In the interbank market, where banks loan to each other, participating banks establish their own interest rates every morning at the market opening. Since 2005, several banks have intentionally rigged the market, pushing the rate higher or lower. Insider trading allowed the participants to bet accordingly. This fraud has reached another level at the locus of the subprime crisis, when these banks used these interest rate manipulations to mask their catastrophic results and refinanced themselves at low rates. Today these banks are slowly being cornered by the Justice Department and facing heavy fines and sanctions.