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Comment by agravier | Hacker News Reader

This nonsense ruling allows the bank to avoid responsibility.

This is the message the french court is giving: "As long as you make money, risk taking is ok. If you screw up, it's your fault. You pay everything back."

Yeah, he's working in the wrong country. Here in the land of the free, when they screw up we pay everything back.

Which is not a bad thing, in my opinion. One of the structural problems that the global financial crisis has revealed is that financial institutions take risks with other peoples' money. If the gamble works, they get a good slice, if it doesn't they don't have to pay anything. It would appear that the French government is opting for gaol time and enormous fines to make individual traders act responsibly, even when their employer refuses to. This is not a bad idea, it makes people self-governing, rather than having a government organisation trying to run audits on companies and detecting how their best accountants have cooked the books.

> It would appear that the French government is opting for gaol time and enormous fines to make individual traders act responsibly, even when their employer refuses to.

It's difficult enough to find a job as a trader now. The banks would simply choose the traders with the most risk taking potential. I personally think it's a step in the wrong direction. It's the employer who has to be made act responsibly, not the individual traders.

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