Yesterday’s Independent has an article by a person called Julie Burchill expressing the sort of racism and xenophobia that would seem more typical of the Sun, as does Andy Watt’s illustration. She doesn’t like Europeans. German is a ‘nasty, phlegmy tongue’ spoken by warmongers, (some people might say the same of English), MEPs are wildly extravagant, and the EU actually has documents translated into different languages. The French speak a ‘twisty old tongue’ and are likely to ‘nuke Strasbourg’ if offended, and Maurice Chevalier was a ‘perv’ abut little girls.
But it’s the Academie Francaise (sic) that really gets her goat. As a freeborn patriotic Britishperson (‘Here in Britain…’) she knows what’s what. The French have an Academy for their language. Quel horreur! But so do other other languages that she mentions, Spanish, Italian and Hebrew for example, the last of which she says she has managed to learn because she’s ‘REALLY smart’. There is an Academy in every Spanish-speaking country and also for Catalan for example. English has a de facto language academy in Oxford University and its Dictionary.
Meanwhile in today’s Independent, Adrian Hamilton also takes on the French again (I have mentioned him before in a similar context):
The Paris trial of the rogue trader Jérôme Kerviel for nearly bringing Société Générale down with €4.9bn losses on unauthorised trades ended as you would have expected, with the full majesty of the French law being brought down on the little man.
At least he knows how to use accents, but apart from assertion and inference he has nothing real to say. It is true that Kerviel has had to carry the can for the black hole, which, by the way, was originally €50bn. The €4.9bn was the final loss after the bank’s damage limitation exercise.
What Hamilton states is essentially Kerviel’s defence at his trial, that the bank was encouraging traders to take risks but disowned him when things went wrong. That may well be so (and unlike Hamilton I choose not to be dogmatic) but I have also read (El País) that Kerviel was supposed to be performing arbitraging deals with shares bought in Asia and sold in Europe or the USA. This sort of trading is done almost instantaneously but what Kerviel was doing was hanging on to the the shares that he had bought to speculate with them, on the bank’s behalf but with a juicy commission for himself if it went well. But the price went down not up. Should the bank have spotted what he was doing? I have no idea, but this puts a different perspective on Hamilton’s assertion that
Kerviel … was only doing what many of his colleagues were up to in high-stakes gambling in the financial markets
Kerviel was operating in late 2007 and early 2008. This was at the beginning of the financial crisis that turned out to be his undoing. Yet, Hamilton is determined to force a point with what may well be a strong contender for the Non Sequitur of the Year Award:
The object [of making Kerviel personally liable for the €4.9bn debt is] that this man should be held responsible for, as the judge declared, "putting in peril the existence of the bank that employed 140,000 people, of which he was a part". Well, that may be. But it wasn't rogue trading that nearly broke the Western financial system and caused the biggest recession since the thirties. It was the actions of the banks and their managements in chasing profits through ever wilder trading and ever more exotic financial instruments.
Has the judge suggested that Kerviel and others like him were responsible for the great crash? Not that I can see. But by a rhetorical sleight of hand Hamilton has managed to move effortlessly from one fact to another, implying cause and effect that are completely lacking.
Hamilton says
No one, not even Société Générale, expects the man actually to repay that money.
No doubt the Société Générale can recognise lost money when it sees it, but its attitude is not quite as harsh as Hamilton implies (BBC) .
“There is no question of demanding such sums from one single man,” said Societe Generale spokeswoman Caroline Guillaumin, speaking to a French radio station. “The bank is completely open to finding another solution which is in the interests of our shareholders and employees.”
The BBC doesn’t believe in foreign accents either. El País names the radio station as France Info.
And finally, we read:
The object is to “send out a message”.
Now that is very interesting; quotation marks without an attribution. Who might have said it? The judge for example? That is what Hamilton would like us to believe, but a Google search for <kerviel “send out a message”> produces 29 hits, none of them relevant to the case before us except Adrian Hamilton himself. So, Mr Hamilton, what are those quotation marks for?
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