Rogue Traders: The French Connection



In 2008 Jerome Kerviel, a French national, was formally charged with the trading incident in which Société De Générale lost close to €5 billion. Jerome held pole position as the greatest rogue trader to tread the earth. Until Bernard Madoff turned up.

Last week Fabrice Tourre, believed to be the architect of the sub-prime mortgage mess, took leave to wait out an SEC probe into privileged hedging aided (and some say abetted) by Goldman Sachs. Mr Tourre is a French national.

France has a history of producing some of the best brains in mathematics: Siméon-Denis Poisson (1781-1840), Joseph Fourier (1768–1830) and, of course, Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749 – 1827). Concocting complex derivatives demands a high aptitude for numbers, a trait shared by Monsieur Kerviel and Tourre. We haven't seen the last of French mathematicians brewing complex algorithms.

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