, Columnist
JPMorgan Might Lose a Drug Ship
Also scripophily, physical Bitcoins, severance and ticker tape.
There has been a lot of controversy over the past few years about big banks being involved in physical commodity trading—not just trading commodity futures on exchanges, but actually buying warehouses and pipelines and ships and getting involved in moving the real physical stuff themselves. This sort of business, the argument goes, opens banks up to new sorts of non-financial risks that they are not necessarily well equipped to handle. What if a bank has an oil spill?
And then of course if banks get involved in the physical cocaine trade in size, there is always the risk of a bank having a drug bust: