What is Digg?Sponsored by Dragon Age: Origins
Follow the Dragon Age: Origins development team on Twitter view!
twitter.com/DragonAge - EA presents BioWare's new dark fantasy epic Dragon Age: Origins. '9/10' from Game Informer.
81 Comments
- statik99, on 11/03/2009, -4/+50Bush clearly has him beat.
- smcgrath, on 01/25/2008, -1/+33Why make a trillion when we could make... billions?
- LUCCHINA, on 01/25/2008, -3/+21Crazy yes, I'm french...and my bank IS the Societe Generale !!! where is my money ?
- eggraid, on 01/25/2008, -1/+14it is 7,14 USD
- FoxFaction, on 01/25/2008, -0/+13"He took home a salary and bonus of less than 100,000 euros, or about $145,700 -- relatively modest in the financial world."
All of a sudden I really want to work in the 'financial world'. - doublsh0t, on 01/25/2008, -1/+11"I'm talking about stealing fractions of a penny here. And, uh, over time they add up to a lot."
- inactive, on 01/25/2008, -1/+9This guy did not make a cent, he will go to prison for costing the bank billions of dollars for no reason. Idiot!!!
- jaybol, on 01/25/2008, -2/+10at least he will get a movie deal and a cushy government job out of it
- lawfuel, on 01/25/2008, -0/+7How this can still happen - by one man - defies belief. We've made it a lead.
- rtoo, on 01/25/2008, -2/+9It's important to note, he didn't actually steal $7B, he lost $7B of the banks money.
- inactive, on 01/25/2008, -1/+7Don't be sad, your money has been propping up our weak markets for the past few months :)
- FiP0, on 01/25/2008, -5/+11I have friends who work at socgen ... and it's my bank.
this sucks. - NorrisTwithman, on 01/25/2008, -0/+5Damn, it feels good to be a gangster
- chrisbosh123, on 01/25/2008, -1/+5you mean "might as well see how high i can go..." because 7.14 billion is pretty god dam high
- tomisina, on 01/25/2008, -1/+4I just so happened to be reading this on wiki this morning:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Trading_Losse ...
jerome made it to the top... and is still at large?! - keeling0ver, on 01/25/2008, -1/+4I wonder if he became increasingly neurotic or if he just stopped caring at some point. After the first billion he must have been thinking "well I'm ***** anyway, might as well see how low I can go..."
- david76, on 01/25/2008, -0/+3There are theories floating around that the unloading of his positions resulted in the global sell-off early this week. So, he not only douped his employer, but he douped the Federal Reserve into dropping interest rates.
- maasox74, on 01/25/2008, -0/+3Maybe not that big an idiot... while in prison he will write a book ($$$$$), when he gets out it will be made into a movie (more $$$$$) and he will end up working as a bank security consultant!
- britishrob, on 01/25/2008, -0/+3Funny 'cos its true...
- crash128, on 01/25/2008, -0/+2Probably just a cry for help. (note to self - send fake resume to Societe Generale tomorrow for newly vacated trader position).
- heystoopid, on 01/25/2008, -0/+2Well I guess the entire Internal Bank Audit Department is in for the high jump retrenchment and or forced retirement , along with his department head his supervisor team leader and the departments auditor as well !
I'd say the slaughter of incompetents will be pretty thorough this time around and very few will be spared ! - sockpuppets, on 01/25/2008, -1/+3Le Wow!
- AntoineDigg, on 01/25/2008, -0/+2Impressive indeed. But one man could not pull that off by himself, let's see where this story goes.
- heystoopid, on 01/25/2008, -0/+2Those French Bank Auditors obviously received training from the late Arthur Andersen Accountants school of fraud training over at the ENRON division to miss errors of this magnitude !
- Farker, on 01/25/2008, -0/+2The "financial world" as defined by the media apparently does not include the much larger proportion of support staff who: (1) don't make anywhere near those "modest salaries", (2) often have to deal with abuse from the a**holes on the trading side, and (3) have the pleasure of being laid-off whenever the highly-paid geniuses in the business screw things up royally.
- heystoopid, on 01/25/2008, -0/+2French Government is not very lenient on bank fraudsters he is going down for a very long time indeed !
Those French Internal Bank Auditors must be total and utter crap at their job , one wonders did they learn their job from Arthur Andersen ENRON Fraud training division ! - aznhomig, on 01/25/2008, -0/+1Whoa.
- eggraid, on 01/25/2008, -0/+1Sorry pal. They should be calling you soon to see if you could contribute to the fund as charity.
- alpinecow, on 01/25/2008, -0/+1They actually were in close contact with the Bank of France and slowly wound the positions down in the course of about 2 days. The problem is that, if SocGen sold too slowly, news would have leaked out and they would have had other firms trying to take advantage of them. In that case, the losses probably could have been much worse. I'm an ex-derivatives trader, so I know the importance of timing...sometimes, ironically, fast selling can be less disruptive than slow.
- jsaya, on 01/25/2008, -0/+1lol...? He has not disappeared!
- heystoopid, on 01/25/2008, -0/+1Crap internal bank auditors and very poor management not supervising staff adequately and constantly reviewing trading accounts every transaction !
- has2k1, on 01/25/2008, -2/+3This guy was just trying to cover up earlier mistakes, and betting big hoping to be vindicated in the future by massive earnings.
- sfgeek, on 01/25/2008, -1/+2I feel rather embarrassed to ask, but what if anything is the French equivalent of the FDIC?
- serpentor, on 01/25/2008, -2/+3Even more strange is that Soc Gen's stock was only down 4% on the news. 4 percent! Two whole year's worth of profit wiped out in an instant, 4% penalty..
Meanwhile, Apple guides Q2 earnings slightly lower than analyst expectations, >$20 billion in market cap is wiped out in the pursuant selloff of Apple shares. - def1234, on 01/25/2008, -2/+3"right. how is that not stealing?"
- david76, on 01/25/2008, -0/+1Auditors, like Andersen, don't look at trading patterns, they look at the balance sheet. Individual, or even groups of, trades aren't reflected on the balance sheets. And it wasn't an error. He was circumventing controls to make his trades and cover his tracks.
- christophelyon, on 01/25/2008, -0/+1The fact is, it's not that the trades he made were so bad, he had taken positions that he wasn't allowed to take on the future markets. He managed to hold them for about a year, by removing them just before the controls (he had knowledge of the control dates since he had worked in the controls department just before taking his new position in trading), and putting them back just after. (and nobody still knows why he did all that).
The problem is, his hierarchy finally discovered what he had done on january 19. They took the foolish decision to close all the positions he had taken before disclosing the case to the public... but they made that just at the time of the mondial stock exchange crack this week, and that's the reason why the loss reached €4.9 billion... If it hadn't been this crack at the exact moment they were closing all the positions, it could have been several billion of gains for the bank instead. - christophelyon, on 01/25/2008, -0/+1I don't think he was an idiot... He was playing with huge amounts of money on long term evolutions of the indices, and by playing I mean he was betting on a long term rise of the markets. The positions he had taken on the future markets weren't meant to be closed so soon, especially not at the time of such a crack...
Of course, if the financial system does not rise in the long term, they could have lost much more than that also, they could have lost everything he had bet in fact (at least several dozens of billions of euro).
Indeed, since the European stock exchanges have gone back rising just after the crack, if they had waited 1 or 2 days before closing his positions, they would have probably lost less money, maybe 1 billion € less... But they didn't know, they were panicking, they used the old trader reflex : where there's a loss, cut it as soon as possible. - heystoopid, on 01/25/2008, -0/+1Or 50 to 100 years minimum sentence on a little island of Corsica !
- christophelyon, on 01/25/2008, -0/+1It's not two years's worth of profit like you say, for this year the SocGen still has profits even after removing these €4.9 billion (plus 2 additionnal billion they had lost anyway thanks to the subprimes...)
- Velnich, on 01/25/2008, -1/+2Regardless of the outcome, I like reading about people this ***** clever and intelligent.
- heystoopid, on 01/25/2008, -0/+1Why it is in the French National Treasury of course !
But then again it is not the first time the French Government has propped up exhausted depositors funds and recapitalized wayward French Banks and financial institutions , nor will it be the last ! - heystoopid, on 01/25/2008, -0/+1The French Government officials spread the unofficial but official word on the QT to temporarily close down all share trading in the company in FRANCE before the official announcement because they did not want another Northern Rock Fiasco !
They got told big time , defy the unofficial QT order and the usual plethora of government tax officials police investigators and other would be arriving directly within the hour for a company tax audit ! - heystoopid, on 01/25/2008, -0/+1Then again it could have lost even more big time given the risk factors involved given the current market falls across nearly every market and the rabid inflation eating the heart out of the main world trading currency due to the excessive use of the printing press to cover the bills . I would estimate that most if not all would have been totally flushed down the nearest toilet !
- gkiltz, on 01/25/2008, -0/+1This DOES beg the question of whether he is a scapegoat for something that has executive-level paw prints all over it!
- uncrase, on 01/25/2008, -0/+1The best has to be the following paragraph in Report on Business
http://www.reportonbusiness.com/servlet/story/RTGA ...
Mr. Kerviel could not be reached for comment. A headshot of him cut from a
trading Website showed an earnest-looking young man. At the start of the
afternoon, when his identity was revealed, he had 11 friends listed on the
facebook.com social website. That number later dropped to four. - Hawkeye2, on 01/27/2008, -0/+1He is an arrogant French egotist, nothing else need be said. He typifies France.
- inactive, on 01/25/2008, -0/+1I'm at Société Générale, and they've been nice and reasonable tll now, I hope it won't change ... :/
- halftank, on 01/25/2008, -0/+1holy merde, quelle jackass!
- slmdg712, on 01/25/2008, -0/+0And I thought whole Enron mess couldn't be topped anytime soon
-
Show 51 - 81 of 81 discussions
Browsing Digg on your phone just got easier with our enhancements to the 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is