There's a theory going round amongst economists that only the dynamism of the Chinese economy and its growing internal market could put the world back on track. Not necessarily. Read more...

The financial crisis is leaving no stone unturned. Once the country that boasted the most international and attractive banking systems on the planet, Iceland is today verging on bankruptcy. Read more...

Commentary on the fraud that has cost French bank Société Générale five billion euros from our Observer Pierre Hessler, a former member of the board of directors for Capgemini. Hessler, author of ‘Company scandals and the media', worries about the incapacity of big banks to adapt their risk management systems to increasingly more complex markets. Read more...

Just hours after Société Générale revealed the biggest fraud in history on Thursday, we received a photo of the rogue trader at hand. It appears that one of his colleagues looked him up on the company's intranet and circulated his profile page by email. Using the internet, it took less than half a day to reveal the identity of the young trader and circulate it around the world. Jérôme Kerviel, ‘the man worth five billion', has since become a kind of icon on the web. A funny phenomenon, but worrying too. Read more...

Société Générale, the French bank, announced this morning that it's been the victim of a rogue trader who has extorted €4.9 bln; saying that it was the bad placement of ‘one of their traders' that allowed the mistake. ‘Valerie', a strategist from another large French bank, explains how it would be very difficult for a trader to manage such an exorbitant fraud by himself. Read more...