I had a good laugh at last week's blog by my colleague Jason Toynbee – especially his recommendation that young city traders might be issued with ASBOs in order to stop them causing any further economic damage. Now, given the recently exposed activities of Jerome Kerviel – the French junior trader whose fraudulent transactions appear to have cost his employer Societe Generale around £4 billion – some might suggest even stronger measures are necessary.

Photograph taken by rednuht. accessed from FlickR and used under Creative Commons license.

While Kerviel's story is making good copy, one problem I have with the press coverage is the depiction of him as a singular and pathological 'rogue trader'. Newspaper reports have tried to account for Kerviel's alleged actions largely by portraying him as a one-off, deviant or 'flawed' personality. Thus we learn that Kerviel was a social introvert whose 'shyness' and 'quiet demeanour' marked him as 'different' to his colleagues. The fact that he was 'never seen with a woman, or a man, always alone' is offered up to signify some (as yet unspecified) psychological problems or personality defects. Bank officials have gone further, and have been quick to identify the previously anonymous Kerviel as a manifestly 'troubled man' with an acknowledged 'fragile mental state', while nameless colleagues have also been moved to label him a 'solitary' figure who may or may not have lived in some kind of 'fantasy world'. Well, OK, perhaps he did – but to me it all sounds pretty ordinary so far. Indeed, the fact that Kerviel 'didn't chat to neighbours', or 'rarely took holidays', hardly marks him out as unusual - sounds like most people with a stressful job.

The aim of all this press-talk is clear; first to shore up belief in the idea that only isolated, 'rogue' individuals commit financial crime (a claim not borne out by any evidence), and, more specifically, to provide SocGen managers, employees and, indeed, the financial industry as a whole, the opportunity to distance themselves from Kerviel, deflecting attention from their own potential culpability in the architecture of this scandal. Indeed, it is arguable here that the media are helping to individualise what is in essence a structural and systemic problem. So I would like to read more about how we have created a financial industry where corporate frauds have become more widespread (if not endemic), that actively encourages and rewards excessive, often reckless, risk-taking, that glamorises individuality in the context of an aggressively masculine culture of deal-breaking and profit-making, that pushes workers to extraordinary limits to achieve targets (but will deride or discard anyone unable to maintain these capriciously applied but ever-increasing standards) and that is widely perceived to lack the moral probity required to ensure effective application of regulatory controls. In fact, it is financial institutions themselves, in slavish adherence to market principles, that create the conditions under which 'rogue' trading can occur – and so can hardly wash their hands of any responsibility when frauds arise. I read recently that Professor Roger Steare of the Cass Business School found that financial services executives subjected to ' integrity tests' tended to 'score lower than average in honesty, loyalty and self-discipline' – a worrying trend but one I think perhaps best explained not by individual pathology but by the ethical deficit contained within the system as a whole; it seems to me that these 'rogue' traders are not born - they're made.

About the author

Mark Banks is Reader in Sociology at the Open University. His research interests include the cultural and creative industries, popular culture, cities and urban space.

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As share prices tumble across the world the pressing question must be, why? Why should there be a 5.5% collapse in value in the space of a single ‘Black Monday’ in the City? The answers are complex of course, and the subject of intense debate. According to one position, catastrophic falls are simply an adjustment (if an extreme one) in a market system that, above all, works. The occasional crisis is simply the price to be paid for a competitive economic regime which is naturally efficient and has produced long term growth and prosperity.

At the critical end of the spectrum, there is an explanation which poses financial crises and full blown recession as endemic. On this view capitalism is contradictory and destructive at its very core, depending as it does on inequality, insecurity and the arbitrary impoverishment of millions of people in times of crisis. Organising economic affairs on the basis of systematic greed, it might reasonably be said, is a recipe for disaster. For what it’s worth I tend to agree with this second position.

Whatever kind of economic analysis is used, though, it’s significant that these explanations remain just that – economic. I think this is too narrow a framework. For one thing, it doesn’t say anything about the immediate subjective factors that trigger a financial crash, make it persist or indeed come to an end. What matters here is what’s going in the minds of financial traders, how they feel as buyers and sellers of stocks and shares. Indeed, during a financial crisis it suddenly becomes clear that the whole system depends on confidence. And when that disappears traders simply follow one another downwards in a circle of fear and uncertainty. ‘Sell! Sell! Sell! ‘ they yell.

Media studies can shed light on this phenomenon. At the turn of the 1960s Stanley Cohen suggested that in portraying the seaside street battles of British youth – the mods and rockers – the media came to represent them as ‘folk devils’. This produced a ‘moral panic’ in society at large, to which the media responded by going further in its representation of bad behaviour. Soon the youth themselves were playing up to the images in the press and television. Cohen called this process, the ‘media amplification spiral’.

Something similar is surely at work among City dealers who not only watch colleagues around them, but see media reports on the activities of fellow wheelers and dealers across the world. Sure enough, on BBC news last night I watched a designer-suited and booted gaggle emerging from their offices at dusk. So young, so angry, so frightened – this could have been a group of mods on the run at Margate, Bank Holiday, 1964. In fact I was witnessing quite a different kind of youth subculture, one whose fear and anxiety is focused on share prices and the state of their performance related bonuses. Today, as the descent continued I couldn’t help thinking that Cohen’s model fits all too well.

What to do? The new standard method for dealing with wayward youth is of course the ASBO. Which prompts the thought: might not capitalism be reformed by means of an anti-social behaviour order? Why can’t we slap one on those boy traders – keep them at home till all the financial foolishness blows over?

About the author

Jason Toynbee is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at The Open University. His research interests are in creativity, copyright, and ethnicity - mainly through music - and his new book, Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World? is just out.

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