Wall Street hunkers down as blizzard roars into region; exchanges open

By John McCrank and Richard Leong

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street traders scrambled to get home or booked hotel rooms on Monday as a potentially historic blizzard bore down on the U.S. northeast, prompting some banks to close branches in the region, though major exchanges said they would remain open as usual.

Financial professionals planned to work from home or in remote offices, as the storm threatens to dump up to 3 feet (90 cm) of snow on the East Coast and disrupt travel for tens of millions of people.

"No one will give me a medal for making it to work after a five-hour commute," said Anurag Bhardwaj, a managing director who works with hedge funds at Barclays Capital in Manhattan, who expected to work from home on Tuesday.

Generally, banks and exchanges sought to make it clear that they were open for business, in part because of their customers outside of the Northeast.

Stock exchanges including Intercontinental Exchange Inc's New York Stock Exchange unit, Nasdaq OMX Group, and BATS Global Markets said their exchanges were expected to stay open for normal operating hours Monday and Tuesday.

The last time foul weather led to the closing of the stock markets was in October 2012 when Superstorm Sandy hit the East with flooding, punishing winds and widespread power outages.

Regulators asked the exchanges to revisit their business continuity plans following that storm to prevent further closures. NYSE and BATS have backup data centers in Chicago, while Nasdaq's backup is in Ashburn, Virginia.

Heavy snowfall has led the NYSE to adjust its hours on several occasions, but the last time the exchange was closed for an entire day due to snow was on Feb. 10, 1969 when a storm dumped 15 inches on New York.

But many Wall Street professionals said there was no reason for them to come to work.

Jason Weisberg, a trader for Seaport Securities Corp, said his clients were not working at all.

"The business I am in, we are not saving lives here and I'm not driving a snow plow. I buy and sell stocks for my customers," he said.

"There are 365 days of the year of which 200-plus are trading days, I can miss a day. I'd like to think the world would spin off its axis because of that, but common sense dictates it is not going to," he added.

The U.S. Treasury rescheduled some government debt auctions to avoid the worst of the weather, and in a separate series of decisions, nearly $300 million of municipal bond sales were postponed.

The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association recommended the domestic bond market remain open, and said it expects markets to be open on Tuesday as well.

Retail banks, including JPMorgan Chase & Co, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo all said they would shut some area branches early and keep them closed through Tuesday, though cash machines would remain open.

Some Chase branches on Long Island were being closed earlier because of declarations of a state of emergency, a company spokesman said.

Traders were keeping tabs on possible highway closures and disruptions to buses and trains.

"We were told to go to skeletal staff before the afternoon," said Karl Haeling, a bond trader at Landesbank Baden-Wurttemberg in New York. "Right now it's business as usual."

The Depository Trust and Clearing Corp, which ensures that U.S. stock, bond and mutual fund trades are paid and accounted for, said it was suspending deposit, withdrawal and other services for certificate-based securities for more than 24 hours as a result of the storm. Services will close from 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday through Tuesday, the DTCC said. Most bonds and other securities today trade electronically without physical delivery of certificates.

(Reporting by John McCrank, Chuck Mikolajczak and Richard Leong; additional reporting by Lauren Tara LaCapra, Jed Horowitz, Luciana Lopez, and David Henry; Editing by Christian Plumb, Bernard Orr)