France's New Anti-Hero.(Business)(Jerome Kerviel )

Byline: Rana Foroohar; With Tracy Mcnicoll in Paris And Stefan Theil in Berlin

When a rogue bank trader loses a record $7 billion, he is embraced as a star by the French, exposing the deep Gallic suspicion of capitalism.

Whenever Hollywood screenwriters decide to stop striking, they should look across the Atlantic for their next plotline. The scandal of French banking giant Societe Generale and the rogue trader JerA[acute accent]me Kerviel has all the makings of a movie. Undereducated underdog infiltrates the ranks of the snootiest Gallic bank, and, spurred on by the promise of limitless riches, proceeds to secretly gamble more than $70 billion of the company's money, losing $7 billion of it and tipping off a global market crash. Central bankers, presidents and prime ministers go into panic mode trying to stem the collateral damage.

You can't make this stuff up, but in fact that's just what Kerviel has been doing for a year or more at SocGen, using high-tech skills gained in the back office to orchestrate and conceal a series of fraudulent European futures trades that has resulted in the single biggest rogue-trader loss ever (chart). While SocGen is in no danger of being sold for a pound the way British bank Barings was post-Nick Leeson--it is far bigger and better capitalized--the bank is now in a severely weakened state that has left it a potential takeover target. A recent Citigroup report noted that despite its current troubles, SocGen"would potentially appeal to both large local and foreign banks."

The scandal has put a spotlight on everything from the fragility of bank risk-management systems, on which the safety of the global financial system increasingly relies, to the need for more seamless communication among central bankers (Fed chair Ben Bernanke was apparently unaware of SocGen's domino effect on global markets as he was slashing U.S. interest rates), to the ambivalence with which many Europeans, in particular the French, still view financial capitalism.

It's an attitude with a rich and deep history. Even as Balzac believed that "behind every great fortune there is a crime" and the late president Francois Mitterrand opposed the notion of "making money in your sleep," many French today view Kerviel not as a simple crook, but as a kind of martyr/scapegoat for a corrupt global financial machine. The glamorization of his story has already begun. Friends and neighbors remember him as an "honest and hardworking boy" who must have been manipulated, and have compared his look and manner to Tom Cruise (his cool movie persona, not the crazy YouTube one).

Kerviel was no statistical genius, and he hadn't graduated from one of the top Parisian finance schools, like many of his posh peers, but from a more humble regional university. That's one reason that he was sitting on the "Delta One" desk, a part of the SocGen trading operation that doesn't require sophisticated math. It may also be the reason that it has been easy for the public to embrace a man being called the "Che Guevara de la finance" and the "James Bond de la SocGen" by French editorialists, and is branded "stronger than Chuck Norris" on the French pages of Facebook, the postmodern ledger on which the scandal is being eagerly mulled over by thousands. Kerviel is more admired than reviled: a recent poll showed that only 13 percent of the French blame him for the SocGen scandal, versus 50 percent pointing the finger at bank management.