France: You've done WHAT?

This writer had planned to have a beer in Harry's Bar in Singapore tomorrow night. But it might not be the best place to be as it's likely that every wannabe journo in town will be looking for someone who will comment on Nick Leeson and his disastrous losses at Barings.

But Leeson's losses, whilst huge, don't even feature in the top slice of losses caused by dodgy trading.

Until today, the biggest was Amaranth Hedge Fund. In September 2006, it collapsed having lost USD6,000 million out of the USD9,000 million it had under management. Although it sold itself as a broad spectrum fund, it was massively over-exposed to the oil and gas industry and when that faltered, Amaranth faded.

The next biggest was Long Term Capital Management - and taking into account inflation / depreciation in the USD, it is probably the biggest because it was in 1998 that it managed to lose USD4,600 million in just four months. Commentators say that its problem was the general economic downturn especially the collapse of value in Russian assets - but the reality is that it was woefully over exposed to complex derivatives which the owners of the fund simply did not understand.

In 1996, Sumitomo suffered a dramatic loss - which it survived, more or less - of USD2,000 million in the UK.

The 1995 collapse of Barings engineered by Leeson - who also ran derivatives that his bosses in London could not understand and, worse, turned a blind eye to and then lied about his position - was a measly USD1,400.

But now all of those seem small, if not actually insignificant.

Société Générale knew and admitted it had a problem with some missing money. But everyone has been utterly stunned when the numbers came in. The general feeling was that there would be some losses due to the US property debacle. But then came the admission that a trader had been up to no good.

USD3,700 million is the size of the hole after the man allegedly lost USD7,000 million. A bank that was looking at being seriously profitable now says it will make less than USD700 million this year. In the 2007 banking climate that's really rather poor. There is only one French bank that's bigger - Crédit Agricole - and late last year it said it had found a USD300 million hole in its accounts.

Oops.