Making Kerviel a hero will not help France’s economy

In most countries, a man who managed to rack up E4.9bn (£3.6bn, $7.1bn) in losses and took one of the nation’s largest banks to the brink of bankruptcy would be a pariah.

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In most countries, a man who managed to rack up E4.9bn (£3.6bn, $7.1bn) in losses and took one of the nation’s largest banks to the brink of bankruptcy would be a pariah. Instead, Jérôme Kerviel has become a hero to the French. And in most countries, the managers of a bank who allowed a single employee to bring it to its knees would be rightly condemned as unfit to run a major public company. And yet in France, the political and commercial establishment is closing ranks around the board of Société Générale, determined that they should survive, and that the bank shouldn’t fall into the hands of foreign predators.

Nothing could better illustrate how, despite all the talk in last year’s presidential campaign of a “rupture” with the past, France remains as doggedly and destructively anti-capitalist as always.

There have been rogue traders before, of course; some have even managed to rehabilitate themselves. Nick Leeson, who bought down Barings Bank, has become an avuncular expert on financial scandals. Joseph Jett, the former Kidder Peabody trader at the centre of one of Wall Street’s biggest scandals of the 1990s, has since written books, gone on lecture tours and set up his own investment management firm.

Rogue trader turns out to be not a bad career choice for a young man playing the markets, so long as you don’t mind losing a few billion to launch yourself, and aren’t frightened by the prospect of a spell in jail. But none have assumed the kind of heroic status that Kerviel has taken on for the French – at least not so quickly. In an editorial, Le Monde described him as “a hero of our time”. The Nouvel Observateur weekly called him the “Che Guevara of Finance” in an editorial (for them, of course, Che was a hero, not the “The Butcher of la Cabaña” he really was).

To those for whom Kerviel isn’t a hero, he is usually seen as an innocent caught up in forces beyond his control. According to the polling firm Opinionway, 77% of French people considered Kerviel a victim. They thought the losses were the results of failing by the bank’s management or the regulators. Only 13% thought the losses were Kerviel’s fault.

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