Friday 25 January 2008

French rogue trader: UPDATE

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 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 bastards.

4 comments:

Mark Wadsworth said...

Are you waiting for somebody to say he was cooking the books? Or "faire cuire les livres"?

Anonymous said...

Tedious blog boring. Why do you bother.

Jon said...

Nothing like a spot on xenophobia for a Friday teatime. Goes down nicely with the Lincoln creams (Lincoln being in ENGLAND) and the Earl Grey (an ENGLISHMAN).

Anonymous 13:20, why not start your own blog and show us all how witty and erudite you can be? Before you do that, though, I suggest a few lessons in basic punctuation might be a good idea.

Unknown said...

Why don't you start your own blog and stop lifting stories from other sources?
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/business/french-trader-was-forced-to-work-30-hours-a-week-20080125680/