As if things were not bad enough in the banking world, one of France’s biggest banks, Societe Generale, seems to have uncovered a fraudulent trading loss of $7bn at its Paris headquarters.  This news may bring a wry smile to the faces of some of Wall Street’s bankers who have found themselves bearing the brunt of the criticism from many European banks about the dodgy investments they have been sold.

If it were me, I should probably keep quiet about the fact that I had been foolish enough to buy billions of euros of these products for my investors without understanding anything about them, despite having the resources of a major modern bank at my disposal.

Continental Europe, it seems, views the current credit crises and its associated problems as something of an Anglo-Saxon creation so it must be sobering to wake up to some good old fashioned in-house fraud.  Everyone can understand that.  Outsiders, like myself, do wonder how so much money can just disappear over a couple of years without being noticed, it is not reassuring.