Monthly Archives: January 2008

Bill Gates on Creative Capitalism

Now that Bill Gates is moving from his full time position at Microsoft to a full time position with his Gates foundation, here’s a sample of what his views are, and what he will be going for in the coming years. This video interview was done before he presented his thoughts at Davos recently.

Options Strategies Review -video

Here’s a video discussion with John Hass, CEO Options House.

Opensource Deal of the Year: Sun acquires MySQL – details & video

If you track open-source software industry developments, Jan 2008 was a big month.

Sun acquired MySQL. Read the details along with all the Q&A and comments here on Jon’s blog.

In Jon’s words:

Here’s a quick interview Rich, Marten, Greg and I did on the Sunday before we signed (personally filmed by noted director Anil Gadre)… pay attention to the good luck charms that show up around the 3:30 marker…

Société Générale hit by $7 billion loss by Rougue Trader- video report

As you may be aware, amidst this past week’s financial market turmoil world wide, we had another very significant development happening. French banking giant Societe Generale revealed a trading fraud which cost the bank $7.2 billion.

Trader Jérôme Kerviel had built combined trading positions over recent months, totalling about €50 billion or $73 billion. SO in this past week, SocGen unwinded about $70 billion dollars of positions (after considering that about $3 billion were direct position losses acknowledged by the bank). One can only imagine the kind of challenge given to SocGen’s best traders to unwind such large positions without causing panic in the markets and protecting their stock price.

This report by Wall Street Journal is the best so far.

We can probably use the simple thumb rule that for every one fraud revealed, at least one more will not be revealed, and one can only imagine what all is hidden in those back office billion dollar trades.

Here are two video reports:

Imagine… SocGen is known internationally for its expertise in equity derivatives. And Risk Magazine had awarded the bank its “Equity Derivatives House of the Year” this month. So a lot of work is needed on the reputation front, to ensure that it does not lose profits from its equity derivatives business. Building reputation is hard; rebuilding is harder.