If experience, as Oscar Wilde once wrote, is simply the name we give our mistakes, then the expertise that Daniel Bouton has gleaned over the last two-and-a-half months ought to place him among the leading authorities on detecting fraud and managing financial risk. That is what French legislators are expecting on Wednesday, when Mr. Bouton, the chairman and chief executive of the beleaguered bank Société Générale, meets with them to answer questions about the state of banking regulation in the country. Mr. Bouton will be speaking in his capacity as president of the French banking federation. But he is likely to be asked to address some unanswered questions about how Jérôme Kerviel, a junior derivatives trader, managed to pile up 50 billion euros in unauthorized bets without raising the suspicion of his managers at Société Générale.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2008/04/failure-is-the-key-to-success/3210/
