Credit Suisse Traders Manipulated IT Systems To Hide $500m Losses

New submitter Qedward writes with a snippet from ComputerWorld UK: "Two traders at Credit Suisse have pleaded guilty to wire fraud and falsifying data after authorities said they had manipulated the bank's record systems, as the credit crunch approached, in order to help conceal over half a billion dollars' worth of losses. The traders admitted to circumventing a mandatory real time reporting system introduced by Credit Suisse, manually entering false profit and loss (P&L) figures as the products they handled collapsed in value. They did so, according to the accusations, under heavy pressure from their manager, who has also been charged."

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Post-onset

[GlobalEcho]

So, these guys were fooling their bosses after the crisis had started. They must have thought prices were going to "come back" so that the deception would never be uncovered. It makes me wonder how many times in history traders have actually pulled this trick, and gotten lucky enough that prices really did revert and save their sorry behinds.

Tip of the iceberg

[History's Coming To]

This is indicative of the main problem in the banking system - money can be brought into existence regardless of whether it actually represents anything. In this case it's through fiddled figures, but it's perfectly normal and acceptable to do essentially the same thing en-masse. As long as enough people are claiming something is worth more than it is then it's worth more, and there's extra money to be had, the only mistake these guys made is not being thousands or millions of people. Look at the Facebook floatation - I don't know what the company is actually worth if you were to break it up today, but it's market value will be pretty much unrelated to that figure simply because lots of people want it to be valuable.

There's only one regulation that's really needed (outside obvious fraud), and that's a conservation law a-la momentum. You want more money? Well you're either going to have to achieve it by taking it from somebody else or by creating new resources through mining, manufacturing or man-hours etc. I'd like to see the hypothetical world-wide balance sheet for the last couple of decades, because I bet it would fail the most simple anti-fraud tests.

Re:Regulations...

[NeutronCowboy]

And fund the court system to litigate this kind of behavior. And have some kind of fund to allow poor people to file lawsuits, lest it turns into a might makes right system. And have a system to create, collect and enforce the taxes necessary for this... Kinda like what we have now.