Today’s BIS email was an interesting one in the light of recent events. It has a speech by Christian Noyer, the Governor of the Bank of France, regarding Basel II’s implementation in France. Remember while you read it that a certain trader’s activities would have been classified as an operational risk loss.
This passage is interesting in the light of the problems at SocGen:

By 31 December 2007, over 30 on-site inspections will have been conducted in 20 institutions, involving at times up to 100 inspectors at a time. These on-site inspections examined IRB systems for credit risk and advanced operational risk measurement approaches.

As SocGen is one of the largest banks in Europe I am presuming that they were one of the banks visited – I think this a safe assumption. This means that SocGen was assessed for operational risk issues while all of the rogue trading activities was going on – the trading that was risking much more than the capital of the bank.
He goes on to say:

…and 5 institutions (accounting for almost 60% of the total assets in the French banking system) are expected to adopt an advanced operational risk measurement approach. As institutions have the possibility under Basel II of using their IRB approaches to calculate regulatory capital requirements, supervisors must ensure that these approaches are reliable.

I really wonder how reliable the regulators found SocGen’s risk management to be in their supervisory visit? How closely did they look? You would have thought that the trading arm, where most, if not all of these events have historically happened, would have been a primary focus of that review. What did they see?
At the very least, SocGen will probably have to carry a much heavier operational risk capital burden now than they would have originally calculated less than a month ago. I think the BoF will have to have a bit more to say on this in the not too distant future. Who is next in line to resign over this? They may not be at SocGen.

[Update]In the light of the latest revelations – see here it looks like a lot more than a single trader should lose his job. It looks like senior management were turning a blind eye to the trading while it was making a profit and only got concerned once it was making a loss. If so, it would make the criminal charge hard to sustain.

There is a lot more to come from this o

ne…[/Update]