A brilliant young rogue trader, who spun an elaborate web of fake transactions from his desk, has cost France’s second-biggest bank â,¬4,9-billion in what appears to be the largest fraud by a single trader.
Société Générale (SocGen) was on Thursday night struggling to shore up confidence in the banking system after the huge fraud was conducted undetected by the junior trader at its headquarters.
Jerome Kerviel (31) deemed ”a genius of fraud” by France’s top banker, caused five times the financial damage of the notorious rogue trader Nick Leeson, who sparked the collapse of Barings Bank in 1995 with losses of £800-million.
The discovery at the weekend of what SocGen deemed an isolated fraud of ”unprecedented size” caused concern in a market already reeling from the sub-prime crisis. There was astonishment at how a junior trader on the bank’s award-winning derivatives desk, described as both ”brilliantly intelligent” and a troubled Walter Mitty character, could create fictitious accounts and wreak havoc. The young trader appeared to have acted alone and reaped no personal financial benefit. ”[It’s] everyone’s worst nightmare,” said Richard Fuld, chairperson of the rival bank Lehman Brothers at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
London was on Thursday awash with rumours that SocGen’s desperate race to clear up the damage and unravel Kerviel’s trading positions were at the heart of the stockmarket turmoil on Monday when share prices across Europe crumbled by 7%.
Even the insistence of the French Prime Minister, François Fillon, that SocGen had ”nothing to do with the situation on the financial markets” failed to stop the gossip.
SocGen insisted it would weather the storm and still post â,¬800m profits for 2007. But news of the fraud could not have come at a worse time, with investor sentiment already fragile and confidence battered. ”How will we [the market] ever get investor confidence back?” asked analysts at the investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort in a research note.
At SocGen’s giant glass tower in the Parisian business district of La Défense, where Kerviel worked, the normally sedate corridors thronged with people in crisis management.
The trader, who joined the bank in 2000, aged 23, was extraordinarily sophisticated and technically proficient. In his first job, he started out developing the intricate computer systems used to control the positions that traders across the bank could take out in markets around the world. To try to control risks, it is now commonplace for each trader to be given a limit on the positions they can take. The SocGen computer was regarded as a hi-tech piece of kit, the best in the business for the best derivatives house around.
But Kerviel knew how to manipulate it. He was moved to a trading job in 2005 to work on a desk known as Delta One. Kerviel had a junior job as a hedger — essentially paid to reduce the bank’s risk by taking out opposite positions to the ones being run by the traders. His salary was not in the stratosphere of high-flying City traders. He was on around â,¬100 000. His personal trading limits would have been small, in the tens of millions of euros.
Around December, he seems to have removed all the limits on his personal trading positions and created fictitious customer accounts. In December he seems to have taken out a series of short positions — essentially betting the markets would fall — and closed them all out so that by the end of the month he was flat. In January, though, he decided to do the opposite, buying the markets through futures contracts in the expectation that the markets would rise. They did anything but and he seems to been got caught out.
Kerviel was found out at the end of last week when one of his trading positions popped up on SocGen’s internal system as being over his trading limits. He immediately confessed to senior executives.
The head of the investment banking arm Jean-Pierre Mustier, who interviewed him throughout Saturday, was said to have become increasingly concerned about him during the course of the day. Kerviel was said to be a Walter Mitty character and was provided with counsellors by the bank. ”Sometimes people don’t know the size of what they are getting into,” Mustier said on Thursday.
He apparently acted alone and did not personally make any money from his fictitious customer accounts. The bank said it was baffled as to his ”irrational” motives. But there is a suggestion that he did it to prove the system could be broken. Michel Marchet of the French CGT banking union warned he may have been trying to get spectacular results to boost his bonus.
Kerviel seems to have believed he had uncovered a sophisticated new way to trade that would unleash huge profits for the bank. It appears he had been trading futures contracts on three major stockmarkets — the French CAC 40 index, Germany’s Dax index, and on the EuroStoxx 50, comprising the biggest stock market-listed companies in the eurozone. The positions appear to have been for â,¬1-billion each. By the time they were assessed on Sunday night they were valued at â,¬2-billion. Kerviel is thought to have helped unravel them. The losses escalated as the stock markets fell.
SocGen’s chief executive, Daniel Bouton, said the fraud was ”very simple in its techniques but extremely sophisticated in his method of concealing it”.
Philippe Collas, from the bank’s global investment management division, said: ”In December things were going very well for him, then he panicked, he gambled against the market, he started deliberately losing to try and hide it, to reduce the possibility he’d be caught. He made no money out of this, not a cent, this wasn’t done to get rich. What was his motive? I don’t know, maybe he wanted to prove himself. It’s difficult to get money out of a bank, as soon as you try you will leave a trace.”
SocGen said the fraud was an ”isolated and exceptional” event. But questions were being asked about why the bank did not reveal the problem earlier.
SocGen on Tuesday announced the â,¬4,9-billion fraud along with losses from the ongoing crisis in the markets. It is writing down a total of â,¬2-billion to cover losses in the subprime mortgage market and also to the so-called monoline insurers which provide top-notch guarantees to bond issues. Such were the losses that, in an attempt to prove that it could withstand them, the bank also raised â,¬5,5-billion to shore up its capital position.
The bank on Thursday began legal proceedings against Kerviel, whose whereabouts were a mystery on Thursday night. Gisele Reynaud, a lecturer at Lyon University who taught him on a fast-track trading course in 2000, described him as ”brilliant” and a ”nice guy”.
His photo from SocGen’s internal system showed him as a serious young man with a furrowed brow. When the news broke on Thursday morning, he had 11 friends on Facebook who steadily deserted his page throughout the day.
Leeson, who single-handedly brought down one of the world’s oldest banks, said the shocking scale of the SocGen fraud proved financial institutions had not learned their lessons.
The now chief executive of Galway United football club told the BBC: ”The first thing that shocked me was not necessarily that it had happened again — I think rogue trading is probably a daily occurrence amongst the financial markets. The thing that really shocked me was the size of it. There are occasions when these sort of scandals will occur in different banks … but I never for one minute thought that it would get to this degree of magnitude and this degree of loss.”
Alain Crouzat, portfolio manager at Montsegur Finance, said: ”We get the feeling that the markets have become a big casino which has lost control. It seems incredible that the Société Générale can lose â,¬5-billion through one operator.”
One London-based analyst said the scale of the losses had left SocGen ”wounded”. Often cited as a takeover target, the French bank could attract bids from the likes of Barclays, which recently lost out in the race to take control of ABN Amro.
The positions, while seemingly complicated to the uninitiated, were as simple as they can be to anyone in the know and particularly inside SocGen, arguably the powerhouse of derivatives trading anywhere in the world. The bank is renowned for employing the brightest boffins around. It was named Equity Derivatives House of the year by one financial magazine in 2007.
Panic stations: How the Fed was spooked
Jerome Kerviel is assured of his place in the gallery of rogue traders, but was he also responsible for the shuddering falls in European stock markets on Monday?
If so, he may deserve a bigger role as the trader who spooked the US Federal Reserve into its biggest cut in interest rates since 1984. The Fed moved on Monday when Wall Street was closed for a holiday partly, it appeared, out of terror that US markets would copy the panic selling seen in Europe when they reopened on Tuesday.
But is now clear that a large slug of the selling was simply SocGen unravelling Kerviel’s positions. Was the ”market meltdown” really caused by one medium-sized French bank’s need to get a big risk off its books in a hurry?
The idea was being debated in the City on Thursday. ”There was a market overhang,” said one trader. ”It was a drip drip into the market on Monday.”
That fits with the facts. Markets across Europe fell 6% or so — the FTSE 100 index was 5,5% lower, its biggest fall since September 2001.
There were plenty of worries, such as the threat of recession in the US and the fear that bond insurers could default, but none of these issues was new. The intensity of the selling was.Attributing precise cause and effect in any stock market move is tricky, but the detail of what Kerviel did is seeping out. In January he bought futures contracts that were, in effect, a bet that share prices would rise.
He seems to have traded on three major stock markets: in France, Germany and the EuroStoxx 50 comprising the biggest stock market listed companies in the eurozone.
The positions in the three stock markets is said to have been for â,¬1-billion (£750-million) each. But that’s their notional value, and understates their real size.
”As they were derivatives the position would have been magnified several fold,” said a trader. One estimate is that unwinding the three contracts would have been equivalent to selling â,¬40-billion of shares in one go which couldn’t fail to move the market.
SocGen chairperson Daniel Bouton almost admitted as much when he said that ”these losses could have been gains if the market had climbed on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday”.
That’s wishful thinking. Financial markets are ruthless and a forced seller has always been easy prey. – Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008