You can already see the outline of the Jerome Kerviel movie we began casting a few days ago forming in stories about him. It will be a story about how a corrupt French class system drove one working class young man to go to extraordinary lengths to get ahead. The same set of rules he had to breach inorder to break through the Bourdeax bottle ceiling also told him he could only make pennies on the dollar with hedged trades. Of course they needed to be broken.
In short, the movie is very likely to follow the script of almost every Wall Street movie ever made, as Larry Ribstein has pointed out. “Films present Kerviel-types not as aberrant criminals, but as commentaries on the evils of capitalism,” Ribstein points out.
What’s more, you can expect trading profits to be seen as entirely produced by privileged insider access or dumb luck. While it is true that luck has a lot to do with some of the biggest wins in trading, the reason so many intellectuals and writers are attracted to the idea that trading profits are produced by luck or corruptions is because the markets are a mystery of them. They think of themselves as very smart people but they can’t understand how and why Wall Street makes money. It must be luck. Or deceit. Or maybe magic!
Since profiting by luck or insider status rather than merit is unjustified in the eyes of the intellectual class, those who damage the institutions seen as thriving on these profits can be heroes.
"So by hurting their banks, Leeson and Kerviel aren’t hurting innocent shareholders or undermining valuable capital markets. They’re providing a day of reckoning for a fundamentally evil system," Ribstein says.
Jerome as Che [Ideoblog]
Posted by , Feb 01, 2008 1:09PM
What part will Gerard Depardieu play? He seems to play a part in every French movie. He'll probably be cast as the morally-determined securities inspector determined to catch Evil. Or perhaps a bumbling but jovial SocGen trading head who is outsmarted by Evil but gets along with everyone. Evil should just be glad that he wasn't a Black African-born criminal or he would've been hung by now.