Screen-gazing: Life in the towers of glass can be dull

Would you tell your boy to seek employment in the City of London? There could be fewer jobs for him in the Square Mile over the next 12 months. The credit crunch has pared back prospects, but there are better reasons why a likeable lad with a sense of adventure might think twice before walking on to a trading floor.

Jerome Kerviel, the Societe Generale “rogue trader”, may finally have put paid to our romance with spiffy jobs in banks. It’s not his misbehaviour that troubles. We don’t yet know whether he did anything really bad — the Paris prosecutor has not laid charges of fraud; instead, the man who cost the bank £3.7 billion is accused of computer hacking, forgery and abuse of trust.

The shy SocGen trader, blessed with a faint resemblance to Tom Cruise, has revealed to us what we long suspected — that life in the towers of glass is mind-numbingly dull. Consider the young Frenchman’s job: After years in a dreary back-office, shuffling paper, he was given a chance to do some real trading. His job was to make money for the bank as an arbitrageur, buying bundles of futures contracts based on European stock market indices while at the same time selling near-identical matching contracts. The bank’s profit derived from exploiting the tiny differences in value between the purchase and the sale.

He was a “master of the universe”, like the bond trader in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, dealing in tiny crumbs. But the rules of Kerviel’s game were constructed to minimise risk to the bank — he was not allowed to have a view, to speculate or gamble. From the millions of individual crumbs, the bank made a loaf and Kerviel was given a tiny nibble, his salary and, perhaps, a bonus.

So uninspiring is the daily duty of screen-gazing, Kerviel’s lawyers assert, that many did like him — broke the rules and dabbled in the markets beyond their authority. Were they trying to draw attention to their wit and skill, hoping for promotion? Or were they just bored out of their minds, lads playing computer games instead of doing their jobs?

They are little different from the Victorian clerks who perched on high chairs in the City’s banking halls, scratching at ledgers, matching balances of money, in and out. It’s probably not what Kerviel had in mind when he set out to make his fortune in high finance. I suspect he wanted to catch a bigger fish. A film that my children love is Captains Courageous, an adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling yarn about a spoilt rich boy who falls off an ocean liner. Picked up by a Portuguese fisherman, Manuel, played in the film by Spencer Tracy, the boy joins the crew of the We’re Here, a schooner hunting for cod off the Grand Banks, and there he learns how to be a man. In a famous scene, Manuel forces the boy to throw his catch, a big halibut, back into the sea, when he finds out that the lad cheated, tangling the hooks of other fishermen.

The We’re Here is gone for ever. Instead, adventurous young men become milksops, stuck in office jobs, indulging in greedy fantasies to while away days of stale coffee. Where is Captain Disko, the avuncular seadog who looks after his crew? You won’t find him at Merrill Lynch or Morgan Stanley. And these banks will become ever more unsuitable employers of young men angling for the main chance. The SocGen affair must lead to more intense scrutiny, a tightening of the manacles that bind traders, analysts and dealers to their desks. If it is not already, investment banking will soon become an unbearable world of paper-shufflers. Small wonder that so many flee to the relative freedom of hedge funds and private equity until they, too, succumb to the tightening net of regulation. In a world intolerant of risk, there is no place for very bright but foolish boys.

Which brings us to the final nail in Kerviel’s coffin. The future of investment banking is likely to be mainly female. Where else will banks look for reliable and co-operative employees? Would a bank rather have a team that looks after its members and discusses problems or a group of dysfunctional individuals working on their own? It’s not a difficult choice. Of course, a team of empathetic females might not catch the really big halibut, but the banks can probably live with that if the girls net a steady and predictable catch of lesser fry. It’s a small price to pay to save 5 billion euros.

©The Times, London