Posted on 01/24/2008 10:38:25 AM PST by GovernmentShrinker
"He finally broke and he walked them through what he had done.
"They totted up his losses and by Sunday night they worked out that the losses were about £1.2 billion.
The bank's bosses decided it had to cancel the bets immediately when the markets opened on Monday.
"They started unwinding them on Monday morning - but because the market was failing the £1.2 billion loss became a £3.7 billion loss."
Some senior City figures said the "positions" were so huge that dumping them on one day could have been enough to trigger Monday's stock market meltdown, the worst since 9/11.
One said: "The market was falling anyway. But when you unwind a position as big as this into a falling market it has a hugely exacerbating effect."
The sudden collapse of stock markets in Europe reverberated around the world for two days until the US Federal Reserve stepped in to cut interest rates by 0.75 per cent.
(Excerpt) Read more at thisislondon.co.uk ...
Chariman/CEO Bouton says he notified French banking regulators on Sunday, but it's not clear when the Fed learned about it.
So the nigerian funds were real?
I still don’t understand what the guy did.
Don’t feel bad. It’s painfully clear that SocGen’s senior management doesn’t understand either. Nor, apparently, does the French central bank, or they would have stepped in to stop the Monday meg-dump. You’re a dentist. What’s their excuse?
Ping
CNBC reported that Bernanke says he didn’t know about it. I’m sure Ben is lying about that.
I’m on record as saying that the Fed panicked because of the general losses in the U.S. stock market but I would believe this too.
They’ll probably “kitchen-sink” their losses. They kinda admit as much right there in the article: “it was about a billion of fraudulent losses, but since the markets were falling, it was really, oh, ten jillion, all because of him, yes that’s the ticket.”
Oh boy here’s the “stimulus package” circus (press conference) on CNBC, this ought to be good.
I’d trust Bernanke before I’d trust the French central bankers, but as far as I know, the latter haven’t even claimed to have notified Bernanke or anyone else.
It’s also not clear whether the French central bank had advance knowledge of the mega-dump plan. Assuming Bouton really did notify them on Sunday, they should have taken control of the situation, but I suspect they were too busy skiing in Davos and figured that just leaving it to Bouton to decide what to do next would minimize the disruption to their junket. What’s becoming clear is that the boy-wonder Kerviel only needs to answer for about a third of the losses.
When these bets went bad, rather than realizing the loss, he doubled down and rolled those futures contracts into a new. larger set of futures contracts.
He probably used the notional amount of the first futures contracts as security for the extra bank capital he spent on the newer, bigger bets.
And it probably continued to snowball until contract delivery time came, and there was not enough cash in the kitty to deliver without setting off alarms.
No, he has to answer for all of them.
A trader is responsible for the losses his positions sustain due to liquidity.
An intelligent trader does not buy 4.99% of a company's stock on margin for a day trade, because when he sells a chunk of stock that big he knows it will drive the price down so dramatically that he may end up with a negative return.
Kerviel is a big boy and he knew exactly what would happen when these futures had to be settled.
Every Europenny of it is on him just as much as it is on his bosses.
I don’t know what’s more absurd - the losses this guy racked up, or a Federal Reserve that got spooked into an inter-meeting ratecut largely based on the residual fallout of one criminal trader.
If the Fed says they were not aware of this when they made the cut, the next question is, why the hell not? I would think a large European bank looking into the abyss is something the Fed should know about...
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&refer=home&sid=aWplLsSN.cGk
This is rich. Bouton said he notified French regulators on Sunday, but now French central bank chief Noyer says he was aware of it “throughout the weekend”. Bloomberg also reports that: “Noyer declined to disclose the timeline of his exchanges with Societe Generale. He also declined to say whether he notified the European Central Bank and the U.S. Federal Reserve.”
Thank you. I understand now.
Because they were not privy to secret conversations between a French CEO and a French regulator.
If professional futures index traders in London were not aware of exactly what was going on this past Monday, there was no way for the Fed to know.
He must have been shorting/selling puts.
See my post #14. It’s looking more and more likely that Bernanke really didn’t know, because Noyer was keeping it to himself. Since this (rather conveniently) went down on a weekend (and even more conveniently, on a weekend in which the US markets were closed on Monday), that would have minimized the number of random SocGen employees who would have been aware that something huge was afoot and could have leaked out alarm bells, and largely cut US traders out of any serious rumor-circulation before the mega-dump began.
But the indices and the whole market went down.
That would indicate that he was holding long positions.
The bottom line....playing the options game is absolute risk and in most cases not worth the effort. For those who pretend to know and understand how to play options....I’d guess that only 25 percent really grasp the game....and only half of that group can ever turn any kind of sustainable profit. The kind of people who play...are usually the type that would immediately go double or nothing when they suffer a huge loss.
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