Financial History

In January 2008, Société Générale announced a loss of 4.9 billion euros. The culprit was a junior trader named Jérôme Kerviel, who had built up unauthorized positions worth roughly 50 billion euros. The bank unwound those positions in a panic, the market absorbed the shock, and Kerviel became the most famous rogue trader since Nick

The Banker Who Sold a War and Then Broke a Nation Jay Cooke financed the Union victory in the Civil War, invented retail investing, and turned ordinary citizens into bondholders. Then, in a single September morning, he took down the entire United States economy and dragged it into a depression that lasted six years. His

There is a particular kind of genius that only reveals itself in hindsight. It is the genius of the financial fraudster, a person who manages to look like the smartest person in the room right up until the moment everyone realizes they were the most dangerous. Jérôme Kerviel nearly brought down Société Générale in 2008.

There is a particular kind of ambition that does not announce itself. It does not wear expensive suits or speak in loud, confident tones at dinner parties. It sits quietly in a back office, learns the plumbing of a system everyone else ignores, and then, one day, decides to use that plumbing to flood the

Why Quantitative Models Fail: The Lesson Hidden Inside LTCM’s Collapse In the autumn of 1998, two Nobel Prize winners and the sharpest mathematical minds on Wall Street watched billions of dollars evaporate in a matter of weeks. The collapse of Long Term Capital Management has been retold a thousand times as a parable about hubris,