i am very happy i turned down a potential offer from soc gen a few weeks ago. i have a feeling they may be laying some people off after this, along with subprime.
I was watching CNBC this morning and they compared what this guy did to “Mission Impossible” movie (Tom Cruise). I thought it was kind of funny. One of the guests also said that this guy might not be found 
he won’t be found because his accomplices (ie: senior bankers) sent hitmen to kill him.
His name is Jerome Kerviel. 31 years old. His pic is also out. He is going to make a lot of money from this infamy. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080125/ap_on_bi_ge/france_societe_generale
he looks a bit like charlie sheen
^ | maybe he is racing to mexico in a stolen car with a hot blonde, while quipping off cheesy dialogue?
His supervisors either had to know what was going or had to be completely stupid. I only have experience with equities…but… Soc Gen had to have paid the brokers commision for the trades and also the capital to take the positions. Who’s in charge of writing the broker’s commision checks? Which custody bank were these positions held? Whose account held these positinos?
FRENCH TRADER WAS FORCED TO WORK 30 HOURS A WEEK FRIENDS of rogue trader Jerome Kerviel last night blamed his $7 billion losses on unbearable levels of stress brought on by a punishing 30 hour week. Kerviel hid his November losses in a batch of wonderfully fresh croissant Kerviel was known to start work as early as nine in the morning and still be at his desk at five or even five-thirty, often with just an hour and a half for lunch. One colleague said: "He was, how you say, une workaholique. I have a family and a mistress so I would leave the office at around 2pm at the latest, if I wasn’t on strike. "But Jerome was tied to that desk. One day I came back to the office at 3pm because I had forgotten my stupid little hat, and there he was, fast asleep on the photocopier. “At first I assumed he had been having sex with it, but then I remembered he’d been working for almost six hours.” As the losses mounted, Kerviel tried to conceal his bad trades by covering them with an intense red wine sauce, later switching to delicate pastry horns. At one point he managed to dispose of dozens of transactions by hiding them inside vol-au-vent cases and staging a fake reception. Last night a spokesman for Sócíété Générálé denied that Kerviel was overworked, insisting he lost the money after betting that the French were about to stop being rude, lazy, arrogant ba**ards.
i just laughed so hard i pee’d a little.
this guy looks angry and mean.
seriously, _Q_, i worked for a french company for a year and a half…i can’t stop laughing. i am *this* close to emailing it to my old boss… who wrote that? sounds like something the onion would do.
So I’m supposed to believe that a 31 year old, former BO assistant trader, making 140k per year would lose $8bn for the company - all this and he didn’t stand to gain financially. Riiiiiiaght. Totally unbelievable. The company is hiding something or it’s a large POS. Either way I’d stay away from it. It’s second rate - just like France.
jeff, I got it from my buddy who is an equity trader - apparently its being passed around the trader world. Everyone I know has truly enjoyed it. It takes a few reads to really appreciate each offensive point.
_Q_ …hilarious post!
funny how FED cut 75 basis point because of a french rouge trader.
Haha, nice one, a ROUGE trader 
Trading in Chanel Rouge Allure huh 
And the Fed did not cut rates because of Jerome Kerviel!
CFAdummy Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I was watching CNBC this morning and they compared > what this guy did to “Mission Impossible” movie > (Tom Cruise). I thought it was kind of funny. One > of the guests also said that this guy might not be > found billwest Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > he won’t be found because his accomplices (ie: > senior bankers) sent hitmen to kill him. Interesting theories. Luckily proven wrong. But maybe we could call him the Seven-billion-dollar-man after this. Anyway, I just listened to an interview with a former middle office controller of theirs, Mr M Legrand, available in Media Player on http://aliceadsl.lci.fr/ Quite interesting to listen to what he said; he describes a system of daily checks and balances and towards the end of the interview he simply concludes that the control system simply didn’t work in this case.
don’t forget it’s a zero sum game - he just re-distributed 7 bil from (mainy) french shareholders + french tax-payers to the rest of us - happy days! - hope you got a bit of it…
Don’t forget that this is a serious operational risk issue. Market risks have been through a long academic process but operational risk is a relative new kid on the block. The thing is it that fraud is difficult to prevent but controls in place within these kind of organisations certainly have had some warning signs. No question about it. Main thing right now is not having the controls but enforcing them - even when the trading floor complains about practical problems they face. You need an operational risk team that knows the business but approaches it with a risk management view - not the view of hoping they are troubling anyone. Most guys and girls in operational risk right now are from an audit background and verbally can’t stand up to the business. At the same time management wants to make money so if you can make a case against controls/checks that makes sense, the operational risk team often loses out. I have seen a few organisations where these things have ironed out and (seem to) work fine but the majority are struggling with these issues.
So he made large trade and then offset them so they zeroed out. But what I don’t understand is how he was able to make the original large trades in the first place. I believe I read he had 500,000 in capital to work with. (That could be incorrect). How then was he able to place the large bets he did. I heard he overrode some monetary restrictions but when you’re betting 50+Billion…its just hard to comprehend even being able to do that.