Corporate scandals: Counting the bezzle

The SocGen E5bn fraud may have come as a bolt from the blue. But the next big fraud won’t. It’s one of the iron laws of finance that when booms end, scandals follow. Think Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and Parmalat – to name just a few - at the end of the dotcom bust. Or Drexel Burnham at the end of the 1980s boom or the Goldman Sachs investment trust implosions in the 1920s. It’s what J. K. Galbraith, who died last year, called «the bezzle»: the «inventory of undiscovered embezzlement» and other lax f...