Good morning
The headlines:
- Hong Kong Air suspends its London route.
Link: that didn’t take long.
After only a year of London flights, Hong Kong Air is “focusing on its Asian offering”.
I was interested by the fact that this was an “all-business class service”.
Anyway – they’re now looking at cutting back on their Airbus orders. Because, you know, higher fuel prices and lower corporate demand. The share prices of EADS (the holding company that owns Airbus), appears unaffected:
- Morgan Stanley Smith Barney fined a little bit.
Link: the futures trader and the $1.3 billion bet.
The brokerage has been fined $450,000 after a trader exceeded his $116 million limit and got up to a $1.3 billion bet three years ago. This happened, um, overnight – and the brokerage eventually made a loss of $14.9 million or so after liquidating the positions.
Sure – the bet got out of control. But why are we fining them? On a $1.3 billion position, a $14 million loss is about a 0.01% (or 10 bps) movement against them. I mean, that’s barely even a brokerage fee – and given that the firm would have charged a brokerage fee to make the bets and charged a second brokerage fee to liquidate them – a $450,000 fine sounds like the brokerage made money on the loss.
Kudos.
The trader in question, Mr Weinryt (who is 31), got fined $7,500 and was suspended from trading for a couple of months.
“Why are they fining them?” is really more: “Why are they bothering because the size of the fine is just embarrassing?”
- China’s fallling foreign investment.
Link: the feet-voting for waning growth.
Foreign Direct Investment fell 8.7% from a year earlier in July. There is general expectation of a reserve requirement cut.
That’s all for now.
Have a good day.
