Soc Gen offers 0% on balance transfers up to €50B

Some interesting things concerning the Shock Gen event:

• Margin. As Alea points out, the margin on Shock Gen's positions would have been about 4.9B euro. Didn't they notice they were funding a few billion euros more margin than they thought they were? If they thought the offsetting position was with a client, didn't they call collateral from the client? Or were they in the habit of letting clients have billions of Euros of equity exposure without margin?
  
• Unsurprisingly, shareholders are suing, claiming market manipulation.
  
• Did Shock Gen find Kerviel or did Eurex? The FT raises the issue, then suggests Eurex first raised the alarm in November.
  
• Kerviel did not lose 4.9B. He only lost 1.5B. OK, still chunky, but the other 3.4 came from management's hasty closing of the position in a falling market.
  
• Things not to say any time after Barings went bust: We all lived in fear that something within the exotic products would blow up in our face. It never came to our mind that we might have a problem with Delta One," said a top Société Générale official.
  
• Investigating judges in France have just thrown out the charge of attempted fraud against Kerviel.
  

And finally, I don't usually quote extended passages, but this from the Daily Mash (from whom I borrowed the post title) is amusing enough to be worth reproducing:

FRIENDS of rogue trader Jérôme Kerviel last night blamed his $7 billion losses on unbearable levels of stress brought on by a punishing 30 hour week.

Kerviel was known to start work as early as nine in the morning and still be at his desk at five or even five-thirty, often with just an hour and a half for lunch.

One colleague said: "He was, how you say, une workaholique. I have a family and a mistress so I would leave the office at around 2pm at the latest, if I wasn't on strike.

"But Jerome was tied to that desk. One day I came back to the office at 3pm because I had forgotten my stupid little hat, and there he was, fast asleep on the photocopier.

"At first I assumed he had been having sex with it, but then I remembered he'd been working for almost six hours."

As the losses mounted, Kerviel tried to conceal his bad trades by covering them with an intense red wine sauce, later switching to delicate pastry horns. At one point he managed to dispose of dozens of transactions by hiding them inside vol-au-vent cases and staging a fake reception...

I'll end with a few sea creatures you might find convenient if you have a few thousand equity index futures to conceal.