Hey Grant, (too long) time no hear, hope everything is going fine for you !
BSD,
I bet you were the counter-party. You must be laughing all the way to the bank (not Soc Gen).
Hehe, I just
wish...
I don't have a boat, but went to the horizon widening
Boot with some friends yesterday, Christ, even a
very modest percentage of his losses would set you up for a life navigating the worlds aquatic hot spots.
This trader earned 100,000 Euros a year working in SocGen. Is that a lot of money for trader with about 7 years experience and living in Paris?
Apparently, which makes the whole thing even
more amazing, he wasn't even a proper trader, just someone responsible for hedging positions, can't imagine that anybody who has a clue about trading would sell their soul for such an amount, wouldn't really make any sense financially, would it...
That was the case with Barings, wasn't it? Everyone left Leeson alone until the crunch came! Why not? The guy was making everyone rich!
Absolutely...
Just found this
very relevant article in the parallel thread on this topic, Krugman is always an enjoyable read and usually spot on in his analysis:
"Last year, the world was astonished to hear that a young employee of the ancient British firm Barings had lost more than a billion dollars in speculative trading, quite literally breaking the bank. But when an even bigger financial disaster was revealed last month--the loss of at least $1.8 billion (the true number is rumored to be $4 billion or more) in the copper market by an employee of Sumitomo Corp.--the story quickly faded from the front pages. "Oh well, just another rogue trader," was the general reaction.
Thanks largely to investigative reporting by the Financial Times, however, it has become clear that Yasuo Hamanaka, unlike Nick Leeson of Barings, was not a poorly supervised employee using his company's money to gamble on unpredictable markets. On the contrary, there is little question that he was, in fact, implementing a deliberate corporate strategy of "cornering" the world copper market--a strategy that worked, yielding huge profits, for a number of years. Hubris brought him down in the end; but it is his initial success, not his eventual failure, that is the really disturbing part of the tale...."
Continued:
"How Copper Came a Cropper
Sumitomo's robber-baron tactics make the case for regulation."
As long as you are making money anything goes in this myopic and hypocritical world of ours, the term
rogue is only added to your name once you have the bad luck of encountering a dry spell.
