After Nick Leeson’s $1.5 billion in fraudulent trades caused the failure of the venerable British bank Barings in 1995, you’d think all major banks would have put in place oversight controls to ensure that no trader would be able to repeat this incomprehensible and untenable feat.
Yet Jerome Kerviel trumped Leeson in 2008 by perpetrating a $7 billion-dollar fraud right under the noses of clueless managers at French banking giant Societe Generale. And we have news today that Kweku Adoboli has done the same by perpetrating a $2 billion-dollar fraud at Swiss banking giant UBS.
All of which begs this question: Is it any wonder incompetent bankers plunged the world into the 2008 economic crisis we’re still struggling to recover from when they operate with so little supervision that a 31-year-old rogue trader can rack up fraudulent trades in the billions of dollars…?
These are the putative masters of the universe who consider themselves the most envied professionals in the world. But, with this latest embarrassment, investment bankers would be lucky if people have as much regard for them these days as they have for used-car salesmen. Hell, the only difference between these shysters seems to be the quality of their suits….