Jerome Kerviel

Categories: Finance,

A trader for French securities firm Société Générale that was charged with losing more than $7 billion in company assets by conducting a series of unauthorized and false trades between 2006 and early 2008. When company managers discovered that Kerviel had conducted tens of billions of dollars' worth of unauthorized trades, they rushed to close out the open positions (most of which were specialized equity arbitrage trades) and contain the extent of the fraud. Several of the trades were closed out with heavy losses due to a falling market at the time of sale.