Margin Call – “Sell it all. Today.”

“Margin Call” is a very underappreciated movie IMO. The movie is starred by Stanley Tucci and Kevin Spacey. There are a lot of parallels between this movie and what happened last Friday with the unwinding of Archegos Capital Management’s positions by Goldman Sachs and others.

No idea why I started thinking about it on Friday 26th March 2021 but its a lot what Goldman Sachs did when it liquidated $10.5 Billion in Stocks in Block Trade Spree. The bank sold $6.6 billion worth of shares of Baidu Inc, Tencent Music Entertainment Group and Vipshop Holdings Ltd, before the US market opened on Friday. Following this, Goldman sold $3.9 billion worth of shares in ViacomCBS Inc, Discovery Inc, Farfetch Ltd , iQIYI Inc and GSX Techedu Inc, according to the report.

Deutsche Bank AG dodged this bullet (mimicking Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and others) by a swift disposal of $4 billion of available-for-sale collateral from its prime brokerage exposure to Hwang. Credit Suisse Group AG and Nomura Holdings Inc. were less fortunate. The collateral they hold may now both be much lower in value and less liquid, taking much longer to offload, with commensurate larger losses. While there were reported attempts to broker a club deal on Archegos and to undertake a collective controlled explosion of the positions, trust among the investment bankers was absent. It became devil take the hindmost.

We already know that Credit Suisse took the brunt of this though. The reporting overall on this has been pretty thin given the fact that one family office going belly up pretty much rocked five gigantic financial service brokerage firms? And disrupted the trading of how many companies? Really a larger point that is apparently being missing – Goldman, Morgan Stanley, et al. did NOT have better risk management in place. They were all on the Titanic – GS and MS simply jumped in the lifeboats more quickly.

1. Controversial, but upon reflection I would put this entire speech up against any speech from “Wall Street.”
2. “So you are a rocket scientist….Maybe you could tell me what is going on. And please, speak as you might to a young child. Or a golden retriever. It wasn’t brains that brought me here; I assure you that.”
3. “Do you care to know why I’m in this chair with you all? I mean, why I earn the big bucks…I’m here for one reason and one reason alone. I’m here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That’s it. Nothing more….”
4. “…And standing here tonight, I’m afraid that I don’t hear – a – thing. Just… silence.” Just so good.