J’accuse!

The strange case of Jerome Kerviel is getting stranger. The WSJ reports:

Société Générale says wayward trader Jérôme Kerviel lost the bank $7.2 billion. But that was last week. He’s now on his way to cult celebrity — and he still hasn’t lost his job.
Société Générale has stopped paying Mr. Kerviel and told him not to come to the office, but it hasn’t managed to formally fire him. French law stipulates that to do that, the bank must first call him in for a sit-down meeting and explain its dissatisfaction. He has the right to bring along a trade-union official, a lawyer or anyone else he’d like.
That will be complicated: A pair of Paris judges this week released Mr. Kerviel from custody but forbade him to have contact with the bank. “This is a very peculiar case,” says Emmanuel Dockès, a law professor at l’Université Lyon 2, Mr. Kerviel’s alma mater in central France.
Reviled by Société Générale as a malevolent fraudster and “mutating virus,” Mr. Kerviel, 31 years old, is now being hailed by a growing band of fans as “Robin Hood,” “the Che Guevara of Finance” and even a genius worthy of the Nobel Prize in economics.

By calling him “the Che Guevara of Finance,” do they mean that he personally shot countless people, including children, for “ideological crimes,” and tried to blow up the Statue of Liberty? Eh…probably not.

“Let’s be honest: No one likes banks…and people like the rich to get cheated,” says Christophe Rocancourt, a celebrated French con man who swindled wealthy Americans in the 1990s by masquerading as a French member of the Rockefeller family, a film producer and various other people.
Edward Yardeni, an American economist who runs an investment-strategy consulting firm, credits Mr. Kerviel with helping save the U.S. from recession. “Merci beaucoup, Jérôme,” says Mr. Yardeni, a former chief economist at Deutsche Bank. Société Générale’s unwinding of Mr. Kerviel’s bad bets, he says, accelerated a market slide that prodded the Fed to slash interest rates.
Mr. Yardeni says French courts will have to decide whether Mr. Kerviel belongs in prison, but “we owe Jérôme quite a few thanks,” and he “certainly deserves a footnote in American economic history.”
The French Communist Party, meanwhile, has compared Mr. Kerviel with Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French army officer whose persecution by the military hierarchy at the end of the 19th century has become a byword for gross injustice.

Wow, I didn’t even know the PCF was still around! Those boys really did have a tough century. It wasn’t just anyone who opposed World War 2 and supported the wars in Indochina and Algeria, plus the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There are, however, some problems with their comparison. For example, Captain Dreyfus lost his job and was sent to Devil’s Island. Kerviel is probably looking at a move deal.

Posted by Eddy Elfenbein on February 1st, 2008 at 12:11 pm

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