Seventy-three billion, three hundred million United States dollars
I wrote a little while ago about the quite phenomenal screw-up at Societe General. It turns out that a rogue trader gambled seventy-three billion, three hundred million United States dollars – US$73,300,000,000 – according to a French presidential aide reported by AP. In addition to the states I mentioned on the earlier post, that would mean a gamble larger than the GDP, again on the World Bank’s figures for 2006, of these countries:
Morocco; Bangladesh; Vietnam; Slovakia; Qatar; Libya; Angola; Croatia; Luxembourg; Ecuador; Slovenia; Sudan; Belarus; Oman; Syria; Serbia; Dominican Republic; Bulgaria; Tunisia; Guatemala; Lithuania; Sri Lanka; Kenya; Lebanon; Turkmenistan; Costa Rica; Latvia; Yemen; Azerbaijan; Uruguay; El Salvador; Cameroon; Cyprus; Trinidad and Tobago; Côte d’Ivoire; Panama; Uzbekistan; Estonia; Iceland; Bahrain; Jordan; Ethiopia; Burma; Ghana; Tanzania; Brunei Darussalam; Bosnia and Herzegovina; Bolivia; Zambia; Botswana; Jamaica; Gabon; Paraguay; Uganda; Senegal; Albania; Honduras; Nepal; Equatorial Guinea; Democratic Republic of the Congo; Afghanistan; Georgia; Mozambique; Republic of the Congo; and Cambodia.
It is worth pointing out that the bank’s processes were sufficiently weak or sufficiently compromised to allow the trader to bet more than the entire market capitalisation of the bank, which stood at US$52.6bn.
xD.
