Volcker Rule

And so we actually made an investment.

This was pre-Dodd-Frank, pre-Volcker Rule, when banks at the holding company could make an investment in, uh, funds as an LP.

And we were one of the early investors in the first Blackstone Real Estate Opportunity Fund.

Um, and then we started doing business with them, you know, providing financing.

will not listen to me, but I think JP Morgan would be better off as a bunch of companies rather than one big monstrous company where nobody has any idea what's going on.

In fact, if I were a bank, I'd take the Volcker Rule and I'd run with it.

I'd be the first bank out there acting like I'm doing it for other people.

We're adopted the Volcker Rule, no more proprietary trading, we're gonna have a commercial bank, we're gonna have an investment bank, we're gonna hedge fund, we're gonna let them all trade individually.

I think in this marketplace, you would actually get a higher value for most banks if you had them trading as individual pieces.

It won't happen because that means letting go of an empire you've essentially built over 20 years, but I think we're paying an immense price for complexity, at least in the financial service business.

effective, I would think, if you had this many people say, and they were all for or against some specific thing.

Like, we're all for the Volcker Rule.

Let's just go nuts and in favor of the Volcker Rule.

Of course, it would be more

effective.

And then the last eight years, I was in the prop desk working in the fundamental investment group where we were essentially using value principles to run a long short portfolio.

And in 2012, I left the bank because we had the new rule came in post the GFC called the Volcker Rule, which essentially made it illegal, I suppose, for investment banks to, or banks rather, to use their capital, to use their, I guess, customer deposits to make proprietary trading bets, for lack of a better word.

So I left the bank then, and I just started managing my own capital.

In the last few years, I've joined a couple of corporate boards.