It’s a long time ago now, but if you’re blessed with a memory for the minutiae of the banking industry over the past decade, you might recall the time a trader was sacked in 2013 for what seemed to be a ‘fairly negligible’ $19m loss made the previous year. That trader has finally been avenged.
His name is Lionel Crassier and these days he seems to have successfully reinvented himself as the sort of Zurich-based software/algorithm consultant that most equities traders might aspire to become. In 2012, however, Crassier was an equities trader running U.S. equities in New York for BNP Paribas when he got a bit ahead of himself and built an overnight trading position of 65,000 mini futures that exceeded his €100m overnight limit and which generated the loss that eventually got him fired.
BNP’s first reaction wasn’t to let go of Crassier entirely though. As press reports from the time made clear, the bank’s first course of action was to “abruptly” recall Crassier from…
