Vive Jerome!
French trendsetters, particularly young women, are hailing rogue trader Jerome Kerviel as their new hero in thousands of blog posts for outsmarting the capitalist system – and also for being cute in that Tom Cruise sort of way.
Not only are fans selling $18 “Jerome Kerviel’s Girlfriend” T-shirts, they’re flooding blogs with praises for the 31-year-old Société Générale trader tied to a record $7.1 billion trading loss over bad bets that SocGen apparently bungled in catching.
Some fans are calling him the “Che Guevara of Finance,” with others saying he should get the Nobel Prize in Economics for making clowns of the Paris money elite.
Others are using the opportunity to mock the laid-back French work ethic, saying Kerviel cracked under the “stress” of its 30-hour workweek. In all, his hits online are soaring into the millions.
Meanwhile it was revealed that Los Angeles billionaire Robert A. Day unloaded $67 million of SocGen stock on Jan. 18, the same day the bank’s brass said it discovered Kerviel’s trading scandal.
Day, 64, a money manager whose personal worth is estimated at $1.6 billion, sits on the bank’s board and runs its US-based money management subsidiary TCW, which holds shabby mortgage assets it’s slowly winding down.
TCW in July was one of the world’s largest holders of such securities – $33.8 billion in all – well ahead of its rivals, including Bear Stearns, according to Standard & Poor’s.
It has since dumped more than $3.2 billion of those assets.
French regulators yesterday began an inquiry into the scandal, but a spokesperson would not say what specific issues they were examining.
Day and two of his foundations also unloaded $140.2 million in stock on Jan. 9 and 10. In two weeks, he unloaded about 37 percent of his stake.
Day’s spokesman said that no improper selling took place.
The probe comes as the bank’s chairman, Daniel Bouton, is under increasing pressure to resign.