Questions have been raised over the effects on the markets of the rogue trader Jerome Kerviel who lost € 4.9bn euros ($7.1bn; £3.7bn) at Societé Generale. Analysts are trying to assess whether the trader's actions contributed to the stock market turmoil and the Fed decision to cut interest rates.
Supervisors and managers had the guts to declare they did nothing wrong. Nothing wrong? When over 7 billion dollars are lost and a tenfold amount was gambled? Is everybody going insane or is it just me, wrong as always: I would surely fall for this testosterone filled, anti-fraud whizkid-bankemployee: Never mind those $ 7 bn as long as you fuck like you do! Oh, seed me with that cum, gimme more, more more . . . They also say that the losses have left the bank vulnerable to a takeover bid. Right, take me over, over and over!
Did our rogue trader cause a market meltdown?
French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said on Friday that the French government was notified about the fraud on Wednesday, though the bank had uncovered it several days earlier. "Maybe the government should have been told earlier," he said. French President Nicolas Sarkozy called the events at Generale a "large-scale internal fraud", but added that the losses "do not affect the solidity and reliability of the French system".

In Amsterdam similar things happen, with groups of young maroccans attacking individual gay men on their way home from parties in the gay hotspots. This is seriously threatening the position of Amsterdam as a tolerant gay tourist attraction. Our old style politics just is much too soft in getting to the core of these problems, with the socialists and christians attracting a significant vote from the muslim community they just cover things up.


That is why I'm re-assessing my own political course. The right has blown itself up since Pim got assasinated, one part got so extreme and intolerant that you can only laugh or cry, the other half has moved so far to the left that they could just as well join our labour party. The left has betrayed its former core membership, opening up our employment market to the entire world but forgetting about the 45 to 65 generation, where social security has been minimised together with their chances of employment. This while their former prime minister now earns an a-social salary of 14 times that of our prime minister at the board of one of our biggest bank conglomerates. The only true left party we have now is as dogmatic and undemocratic as the Chinese communists.

So, for me, as gay person, any religion based party is out of the question. The only place I can find refuge is a small central liberal reform party called D'66. But with them I also have questions: They support deepening democracy. I feel our country has all the democracy it needs. We have 3 layers of representration, where professionals are in place to make well funded decisions. They are controlled by the electorate and their parties. We do not need to get each and everybody involved as amateur politicians in more detailed decisions. With referenda the general public has proved to make awful choices: they tend to choose the most conservative options (it was good as it was, fat chance of it getting better) and also have a strong tendency to go for the "not in my backyard" option: sentiments seem to blur their broader view.