Morning News: On Jérôme Kerviel's Schooling
It will take a while, I expect, for a clear narrative to explain Jérôme Kerviel’s disastrous trades at SocGen. All we know now is that nobody can figure out how the young man contrived to hide his balloon of unauthorized bets. Well, we do know one other thing. It is mentioned in almost every news story, even though it has nothing to do with the wrongdoing. Mr Kerviel did not attend one of the Grandes Écoles — those redoubtable institutions that the Times this morning compared to Harvard and MIT. No; he attended a “business college in Lyon.” We all know that.
Isn’t it interesting that we all know that — that Mr Kerviel’s education (or lack of it) has been established as an integral part of his story? I wouldn’t want to be a French outsider trying to follow in the Breton clerk’s footsteps anytime soon, not while the portcullis of privilege, clattering shut even as we speak, bars entry to the Elysian fields of French advanced placement. It would be interesting to know the identity of the gatekeeper who made sure that early reports of SocGen’s losses gleamed with a detail that, however irrelevant, no journalist would be able to resist.