[e-gold-list] Re: Nick Leeson

[Jim Davidson]

Dear Jim,  

> times four...

One does wonder whether his trading activity was
authorized or not. It is certainly a good front to
say that his work was unauthorized, and, thus, he
was defrauding his company.  But, what we know, and
what we are likely to learn, is all packaged by the
company for which he worked.

It certainly speaks to poor information security to
see a guy making $146K working in "unauthorized"
trades to cost the bank $7.3 billion.  Sure, leverage
the positions on margin, at whatever margin the bank
gets to have, plus buy the positions as derivatives
to further multiply the gain/loss scenario, but it
still seems like a lot of money available to a guy
handling pretty minor trades - if we are to believe
any of this manure.

"The bank also announced further writedowns of €2.05
billion relating to the global credit crunch."

Heh.  That's another $2.92 billion or so.

Are the bank's incompetence and losses due to sub-prime
experimentation being disguised as an evil rogue trader?
I'm not the only one looking at the bank's credibility
askance. "Ion-Marc Valahu, the head of trading at Amas
Bank in Switzerland, said: 'I am sorry but I have a hard
time buying the fact that a trader was able to set up a
’secret trade’ of €4.9 billion without anybody finding out.'"

Regards,

Jim
 http://vertoro.blogspot.com/

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