Do Financial Execs Committing 'Suicide' Know Something We Don't?

[Editor’s Note: The following post is by TDV contributor, Wendy McElroy]

Another financial executive in his prime apparently committed suicide last week. JP Morgan Forex trader Li Junjie reportedly jumped off a JP Morgan rooftop in Hong Kong. Speculation Swirls. 

Sunday, Jan. 26: William Broeksmit, a 58-year-old former senior executive at Deutsche Bank AG, was found dead in his London home after an apparent suicide by hanging.

Monday, Jan. 27: Tata Motors managing director Karl Slym died after falling from a hotel room in Bangkok where he was staying with his wife.

Tuesday, Jan. 28: 39-year-old vice president in JPMorgan’s investment bank’s technology department, Gabriel Magee, died after falling from the roof of the company’s European HQ in London. Police initially reported that “thousands of horrified commuters” witnessed the death. Unable to produce a single one, police are now investigating. Wall Street on Parade (Feb. 23) reported, “[F]riends report that Magee was a happy, healthy, vibrant young man who emailed his girlfriend on the evening of January 27 to say he…would be home shortly.”

Wednesday, January 29: 50-year-old Russell Investments’ Chief Economist Mike Dueker died from apparently jumping over a 4-foot fence and from a ramp near a Tacoma, Washington bridge. His body was not discovered for days.

The week before, a U.K.-based communications director at Swiss Re AG died. The cause of death has not been made public. (The reference is to Tim Dickenson; the circumstances of his death are still undisclosed.)

Monday, February 3: 37-year-old JP Morgan executive in Equities Trading, Ryan Crane, died suddenly in his Stamford, Connecticut, home. The state’s chief medical examiner is determining the cause. When Wall Street On Parade called the Stamford Police to ask for the police incident report to which the press is legally entitled under Connecticut law, it was told “if we were able to obtain the incident report, most information would likely be redacted.”

Tuesday, February 18: 33-year old JP Morgan Fforex trader Li Junjie is the latest in a string of suicides to take his life in Hong Kong. No suicide note was found. Two days before his suicide, Junjie spoke of plans to return to Toronto, where he had worked at the Royal Bank of Canada.

Other names could be added to the Financial Post list:

December 15, 2013: 34-year-old JP Morgan employee in Client Technology Service Jason Alan Salais died in Texas of an apparent heart attack. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the rate of heart attacks among men aged 20 to 39 is one half of one percent of the population.

February 4, 2014: 57-year-old founder and CEO of American Title Service Richard Talley died after apparently shooting himself with a nail gun. The Denver Post (Feb. 10) stated that he had shot himself seven or eight times in the head and chest. Talley and his company were being investigated by state insurance regulators at the time.

Meanwhile, a 20-year veteran at the Wall Street Journal David Bird was last seen leaving his New Jersey home on January 11, 2014. He is reported as officially missing. Bird covered Commodities Markets.

“A good conspiracy is unprovable. I mean, if you can prove it, it means they screwed up somewhere along the line.” -  Jerry Fletcher

Conspiracy theory is a dim-lit place where the hard outline of reality is only glimpsed. The essence of a conspiracy involves hidden data, misinformation and protestations of innocent mixed with scorn toward any accuser. Besides which, so many events can be explained by incompetence or coincidence that a covert global plot seems more appropriate to movie scripts.   

Those who point to conspiracy note that the four dead JP Morgan employees were in their 30s with no history of mental instability. Wall Street on Parade reported further on a massive Forex investigation, “three weeks before the death of Salais and within a little more than a month of the other deaths, JP Morgan had been put under a form of probation by the U.S. Justice Department. In exchange for a Deferred Prosecution Agreement that ran for two years and $1.7 billion in fines to avoid the criminal indictment of individuals and the firm for facilitating the largest financial fraud in US history, Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, JP Morgan was forced to agree to ‘secure the attendance and truthful statements or testimony of any past or current officers, agents, or employees at any meeting or interview or before the grand jury…provide…all documents, records, information and other evidence in JPMorgan’s possession, custody or control as may be requested by the Office, the FBI, or designated governmental agency…bring to the Office’s attention all criminal conduct by JPMorgan or any of its employees’.” 

But the simmering scandal points equally to an explanation other than conspiracy. The deaths could easily be ascribed to bankers who are unwilling to face the ordeal of a Forex expose bursting into the spotlight. Whatever the cause, the high death rate deserves attention because it indicates something badly amiss in the macro-financial world. Something may be about to spin out of control. 

Of course, the death rate could always be the result of a statistical problem called the clustering illusion by which random events appear to be clustered or related. But I doubt it. There is a strangeness in the details of most of the deaths that does not fit neatly into a pattern of suicide. Moreover, if the JP Morgan people were actually investment bankers and so related, the cluster illusion explanation is unsatisfying. 

I tend to agree with the economic guru and iconoclast Zero Hedge who wrote of Junjie’s death, “Perhaps what is most notable about this particular death is the reference that the man was involved with FX trading: as is well-known, this is a hot topic for banks around the world, as it is expected to be the next Libor-manipulation like bonanza for regulators and enforcers. Did he know too much?”

If he did know too much, the knowledge may have led to suicide. In any case, if bankers are killing themselves or worse, it is bad news for the stability of global finance.