Jerome Kerviel

You may have heard by now that the global sell off on Monday may have partly been a result of Jerome Kerviel - the so-called "rogue trader" at Societe Generale in France. He purportedly lost the bank $7.1 Billion. Single-handedly. One man. 31 Years old. Incredible.

This supposedly resulted from placing massive bets that the European markets will go up in January. Until December 2007, he was massively in the black. So, he decided to counter his trading positions in late December, and he was dead wrong.

These are from reports I've picked up over the past two days.

Here's an interesting excerpt from the New York Times:

"But while the revelation of Mr. Kerviel’s fraud is hugely embarrassing to SocGen, the affair has not been entirely tragic, according to the Toronto-based Globe and Mail. On Thursday, The paper gleefully seized SocGen’s fraud-induced crisis as the underlying impetus for Tuesday’s surprise interest rate cut by the Federal Reserve.

“U.S. borrowers, give thanks to an unlikely hero: Jerome Kerviel,” The Globe and Mail’s Boyd Erman wrote. “As you revel in the lower interest charges on your line of credit…think of how one brave Frenchman came to your rescue.”"