Rogue French trader Jerome Kerviel was forced to work 30 hours a week!

January 30, 2008   

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Friends of rogue trader Jerome Kerviel last night blamed his $7 billion losses on unbearable levels of stress brought on by a punishing 30 hour week.

Kerviel was known to start work as early as nine in the morning and still be at his desk at five or even five-thirty, often with just an hour and a half for lunch.

One colleague said: “He was, how you say, une workaholique. I have a family and a mistress so I would leave the office at around 2pm at the latest, if I wasn’t on strike.

“But Jerome was tied to that desk. One day I came back to the office at 3pm because I had forgotten my beret, and there he was, fast asleep on the photocopier.

“At first I assumed he had been out until dawn the night before, but then I remembered he’d been working for almost six hours.”

As the losses mounted, Kerviel tried to conceal his bad trades by covering them with an intense red wine sauce, later switching to delicate pastry horns.

At one point he managed to dispose of dozens of transactions by hiding them inside vol-au-vent cases and staging a fake reception.

  • Frenchy bashing is quite out of fashion, you know?

    Esp. when the guy you talk about didn’t take a vacation for the last 2 years.

    Not exactly your case.

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  • The average American works 46h/week, which makes 2208h a year.
    For JK with 30h/week it makes 1440h a year (assuming no break for Christmas and New Year…).
    this correspond to JK taking a full month and two days of vacation compare to the average worker. It is safe to assume Fabrice works more than average worker so he can take more than one month vacation a year still put in more work than JK and perhaps not lose more than 1 billion dollar:)

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  • This blog was hilariously funny! I couldn’t stop laughing when I was reading it.

    And, unfortunately, to the regrets of Mr. Kerviel’s colleagues and many others, it seems that President Nicolas Sarkozy will worsen these harsh working conditions – He desires to increase the outrageous 30 hours per week to 40-hours workweek! I guess, if President Sarkozy succeeds in this effort, we might expected similar ludicrous events in France.

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  • Yep Fabrice, you see he is able to do that working 30 hours a week while you went bankrup and lost money for a lot of people with your very good friend Arnaud not so long ago …. see, no need to work a lot and play the easy guy with all his flat screens, video games, new york flat and bunch of very intelligent friends like Thiel to loose money… Hilarous, isn’t it ? yes sir JK is to blame but not for being French …this is far too easy and very not funny on your blog, far more on a satiric newspaper at lest we understand they take it the funny way while you just appear to say… JK in France is lazy, me in US hard worker, hard player patati patata… Nul c’st nul de ta part.

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  • Obviously the very same thing can be done in the US or any country using stereotypes – I just thought it was very creative – like “Here comes another bubble” or “Wall Street Meltdown” or some of the other videos you can watch in “Displays of Creativity”.

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