The Globe and Mail

The Societe Generale "rogue trader" affair is only a week old and we can already guess the outcome: Book and film contracts that could make the alleged rogue, Jerome Kerivel, a bundle of money and assure him fame for years.
 
The story is getting better by the day and you can bet book publishers and film directors are getting all excited about a 31-year-old nobody who triggered the biggest French banking crisis in memory. What intrigue! What appeared at first as a simple case of a lone trader running amok and undetected in spite of sophisticated trading and risk controls is starting to look like a wider case of SocGen incompetence and greed, with a whiff of coverup. Anyone who knows anything about derviatives trading finds it hard to believe that positions worth as much as 50-billion euros in European stock index futures -- the amount Kerviel is said to have piled up -- would go entirely undetected by the young man's supervisers and the investment bank's trade-management systems. We now know that Eurex, the European futures and options exchange, sounded the alarm bell about some Kerviel trades in November and nothing was done about it.
 
By the end of last year, Kerviel claimed he has made profits of  1.4-billion euros before it all went horribly wrong. "I cannot believe that my superiors did not realize the money I was committing," he said in a statement to French police. "It was impossible to generate such profits with small positions."
 
Good point. So the script only gets better and better. It appears that Kerviel will bring down a lot of colleagues, perhaps SocGen's chairman and the head of investment banking, before it all ends. SocGen itself stands to lose its independence as its share price and reputation take a beating. French president Nicolas Sarkozy, the amour of Italian model and chanteuse Carla Bruni, is involved. There is even a mysterious second Kerviel -- first name Olivier -- who may or may not be Jerome's young brother. Olivier worked at rival BNP Paribas until he resigned last year under unusual circumstances. For scriptwriters, it just doesn't get any better.
 
Nick Leeson, the British rogue trader who brought down Barings bank in 1995, wrote two books about his gory escapade and inspired a movie, released in 1999 which starred Ewan McGregor as Leeson. Neither the books nor the movie were compelling pieces of journalism or entertainment. The SocGen story is bigger and better on every level, even if SocGen is still profitable and stands almost no chance of going under. Kerviel may well go to prison if convicted. If he does, he'll no doubt get a lot of visits from his very happy agent.