We’ve been trying to get in touch with people who knew Jerome Kerviel but the guy seems to be one of those “kept to him over the weekend at Societe Generale. Right now he’s just a name, a face, an accusation, a denial and lots of speculation. We want to find out who he was.
In case you’ve been too busy to notice, Kerviel is just about the most famous name in finance right now. He’s accused of causing a $7 billion loss at SocGen. After a brief period where it seems he may have gone fugitive, he turned up in Paris. After questioning by police it emerged that he admitted to placing the trades but denied any fraud was involved. The court released him on bail and declined to press fraud charges.
Now there are serious questions about what SocGen knew and when about Kerviel’s trading activities. There’s a widespread suspicion that if Kerviel’s trades were exactly authorized by the bank, it may have turned a blind eye to his risky trading. At some point he seems to have been able to make trades totally as much as ten times the losses the bank suffered. How did that happen with no-one noticing? The European futures and options exchange apparently raised questions about Kerviel’s trades back in November. What’s more, as we first learned from our commenters, Soc Gen’s panicked dumping of Kerveil's positions seems to have worsened the losses.And now, of course, everyone is speculating that Soc Gen might get sold to someone.
We want to avoid all this "lone trader" and "nice boy who kept to himself" stuff. But it's damned hard when no-one even seems to remember him. The more questions we ask, the more it seems he really was a loner desperately seeking acceptance and a way out of his congenital anonymity. It freaks us out to watch a cliche come to life.
Posted by , Jan 29, 2008 3:53PM
keyser soze.
nuff said