By now we’ve all seen the headline—“French Bank Rocked by Rogue Trader!”—heralding the debacle at Societe Generale as the largest bank fraud in history.
Then come the details: A “mid-level” employee, unbeknownst to anyone else at one of the most venerated banks in France, bet $73 billion of the bank’s money, costing it $7.2 billion. The newspapers promptly dusted off all the familiar names in the annals of bank fraud, including Joseph Jett of Kidder Peabody and Nick Leeson of Barings Bank, among others. Societe Generale’s fraud tops them all, by far.
Having been involved in a number of the most high-profile ...