Anglais, talk show

and you're watching Econ News. Today we'll be talking about the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. We are glad to receive three distinguished guests.

- Good afternoon Mister Serageldin…., You are a former trader from Credit Suisse. Your colleagues used to call you “the investment-banking monk”. In 2007, you hide more than a hundred million of dollars in losses in a mortgage-backed securities trading book at Credit Suisse. For that, you have been sentenced to 30 months in prison and to give back more than 25 million dollars in compensation to Credit Suisse.

- We also welcome Greg Lippmann, you worked for Deutsche Bank and you became well known for having profited from the crisis.

- And finally, let’s have a round of applause to Michael Lewis, the author of The Big Short : Inside the Doomsday Machine. You are specialized in financial journalism but you started your career in finance more precisely at Salomon Brothers.

My name is kareem Serageldin former Swiss credit trader sentenced to 30 months of jails for hiding a loss of 100 million. Today I do lectures in business schools, finance, in universities to allow them to profit of my experience as a former trader and to warn them against the world of finance.

Hi, i don't know why, i'm here but i will present me, i'm Gregg Lippman.

Hi! Thank you for inviting me. It’s always a pleasure to get the opportunity to debate publicly. I’m here today because I want people to understand how useful but also dangerous finance is. It’s very important that people be aware of how Financial System works. That is why I’m trying to do in my books. Talking about books, I have published last year “Flash Boys”, a book where I described a new threat that could hit our economy: The High Frequency Trading. But we’ll maybe be able to talk about it later.

To Kareem Serageldin

Well, let’s start with you Mister Serageldin. You have been THE ONLY Wall Street banker to go to jail.

Do you think you have been a sort of scapegoat in order to content the public ?

You know I am only a small fish among the great sharks.

Indeed we wanted to give an example and I was delivered and described as one of the biggest ecos in finance while I am a small player compared to these great sharks as a former trader Fabrice Touré at Morgan Stanley who lost his investors $ 10 billion. You know his sentence: 825 thousand dollars as a fine, he did not go to jail.

But I am guilty and I merit my sentence, I am not trying to deny it.

Moreover I do not think my employer ignored my losses, he knew it and had confidence in me as long as I was doing money.

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To Michael Lewis

I personally travelled to Florida to observe the “rocket docket”: it refers to a court that is noted for its speedy disposition of cases and controversies that come before it On some days, the court heared up to 1,000 cases per day; this equates to less than 30 seconds per case.

We have seen that Wall Street got away but even more, courts have been so complaisant with banks in foreclosure courts to enable quick resale of the properties, while obscuring the fraudulent and predatory nature of the loans. Why does justice not protect the people affected by the crisis?

I think that the financial system is fraudulent. There is an obvious collusion between the big Banks and the government. Justice is protecting the big Banks because those Banks hire many workers and hold a lot of economic interests. Because of this, they think they are untouchable. They think the government will always protect them and prevent them from collapsing. They suppose they are “too big to fail” ans they take too much risks, eventually leading us to a financial crisis. But history taught us that those banks could collapse, for example Lehman Brothers, the fourth biggest bank of the USA at that time, which went bankrupt. The problem is that when those Banks play around with their money, it affects the lowest and middle class.

But I’m sure M.Lippman is well aware of this, of course…

To Gregg Lippman

You had an informational advantage working at Deutsche Bank and you used it to bet against your own employer. Iny our opinion, where does your money come from ? whose money was it before it became your ? According to me, the economy is a zero-sum game.

I'm not an important people in Finance.

I ultimately don’t feel that I was the problem. I think the problem was the people who bought too much of MBSs, and lost.

I don’t feel guilty. Look, if more people had viewed the world

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