JP Morgan £1.2bn trading loss

Saturday's newspapers have revealed details of the man thought to be responsible for the massive loss at JP Morgan which has sent shockwaves through the city.The Guardian has named him as Bruno Iksil, thought to be one of the highest-paid bankers in London.

Married with four children, he spends Monday to Thursday in London, staying in a flat in Earls Court, returning to France on Fridays. A graduate in engineering from the École Centrale in Paris 20 years ago, Iksil had become well known in the opaque $10tn market for credit default swaps.

The Mail, The Sun and The Mirror point out that he had earned the nickname of the "London Whale" and also Voldemort, after Harry Potter's nemesis.

The Telegraph reports the firms' bosses were told the loss was an accident waiting to happen.

The share price of America's biggest bank tumbled today, after overnight revelations that a team of its traders lost more than a billion pounds.

The Chief Executive of JP Morgan said errors, sloppiness and bad judgement were to blame.

Romily Weeks explains:

JP Morgan's $2 billion trading loss has had a negative knock-on effect on a number of other banks. After the bank made the announcement their shares fell by 7%. Other banks also experienced falls in their shares:

• Citigroup was down 3.3%
• Bank of American was down 2.9%
• Morgan Stanley was down 2.4%
• Goldman Sachs was down 2.2%

Analysts say the lack of details of how exactly the bank made the colossal loss over six weeks is adding to market jitters.

JP Morgan chief executive James Dimon arranged a conference call with analysts and investors to explain how the bank managed to lose $2 billion in a six week period of ill-fated risky investments.

He admitted the bank's strategy was "flawed, complex, poorly reviewed, poorly executed and poorly monitored" but stressed that the bank remains profitably despite the huge loss.

JP Morgan's stock plunged 7% in after-hours trading following the announcement that it lost $2 billion dollars in the past six weeks.

The loss came from a trader known in bond markets as the 'London whale" who was reported to be making trades worth up to 10 trillion dollars in April.

America's largest bank has revealed it has lost $2 billion dollars (£1.24 billion) in the past six weeks through a series of blunders at the bank's Chief Investment Office (CIO) in London.

The bank's London office is responsible for managing risk for the New York company.

Partly because of the loss, JPMorgan said it expected an overall loss of $800 million dollars (£497m) this quarter from the Chief Investment Office segment of the business.