International banks employ hundreds of thousands of highly educated people to invest funds through the global capital markets. These trades are overseered by top executives and governmental inspectors. Computers registered every transaction.
Big or small.
Two purchases of less than $15 pushed my account into the red and my bank issued a penalty of $35. I complained to my bank manager without success.
“We have rules.”
What he actually should have said was that the banks have two sets of rules. The first for the common man and the second for the banks themselves, for the Swiss banking giant allowed a single trader to rack up a loss of $2.3 billion without any blinking lights or ringing bells alerting either authorities or company accountants to the supposed ‘rogue trading’.
The blame for this shortfall fell on a small trader on the Delta 1 desk, same Jerome Kerviel of Societe Generale, who incurred larger debts on currency speculation. Both banks set police on their employees and professed that they were acting alone.
One of the primary rules of robbing a bank is never to spend the money and if someone was investing hundreds of millions of dollars without any return, management should have pushed away from their computers of wealth long enough to say, “Whoa, what’s this?”
Instead the bankers and investors are so eager to exact their pound of geld from every trade passing through their systems that they never have the time to examine the results, even when said trades violate credit policy.
In other words they are all fuck-ups, but fuck-ups have an escape valve.
The fall guy.
And in this case the weight of accusation has dropped like an asteroid on his head. Kweki Adoboli, a Ghana native and Gemini, graduated from Nottingham University and worked for UBS on their Global Synthetic Equities team. That term Global Synthetic Equities should have raise a red flag from the beginning. GSE screamed out scam. Synthethic equity easily could be interpreted as counterfeit money and printing fake cash is a crime in every country except the within the world of international finance.
Bankers do not care about economy. They are dedicated to wringing money out of circulation to create profit from their air-guitar manipulation of transactions. The staid bankers of the 50s have been transformed into the casino junkies of the nouveau tricheurs or new hustlers. Risk is their drug and like all gamblers they get more off on loss than winning. As long as they have money and suckers to hold the bag of shit they have creasted, they will stay at the table and they will play until the losses aren’t in the billions or trillions, but the quadrillions.
ie all the money in the world.
And on that day they won’t have Mr Adololi to blame.
ps UBS said that the $2.3 billion was a manageable loss.
If a gambler covered every number of a roulette table with a $1000 chip, the croupier would have to spin the wheel approximately 600,000. Figuring a minute for each play, the pile of 23,000,000 would be depleted in 15 years.
Gemtlemen and voodoo bankers place your bets.
The ball is in play.