Citigroup Faces $180 Million Loss on Loan to Asia Hedge Fund

[JSOP]

Selected extracts from the article. It was the Turkish lira trade! Were they long Turkish lira all the way down?

GF Holdings is not well known in banking and investment circles, and some market participants have expressed surprise that it could be big enough to run up such losses without developing a more public profile. GF Holdings did not respond to a request for comment.

The scale of the loss for Citi will depend on how successful the bank is in unwinding the trades. The exact nature of the fund’s losses is unclear but they are thought to be related at least in part to the Turkish lira, which crashed to record lows earlier this year. It is also unclear how the losses for the bank ballooned to such a size without the fund being forced to post extra collateral earlier.

China must've been long in lira since it's one of Turkey's closest trading allies. The lira has actually been going up quite nicely for the whole year culminating to its high point this summer so if China had been long in lira since the beginning of this year until this summer, it would've made quite a nice profit and that's prob. when Citi loaned it more money for it play a bigger hand. And then it probably got caught in its down leg from the high of this summer until now and that's when Citi's loan sustained the loss. Just my personal speculation. Wonder how much did this "Asian hedge fund" lose.