The Long Johns, John Fortune & John Bird, explain in interview just exactly how the subprime mortgage crisis really happened. Realer than you’d think (stolen from Valleywag)

My current favorite banking scandal-related fact: Jérôme Kerviel, the mild-mannered French rogue banker who lost over €4.9 billion in one month and may have thereby perpetrated the current market cliff-jump, had eleven friends on Facebook.

Parenthetical: Richard Milhous Nixon probably has more friends on Facebook and he’s for reals dead, not just career dead!

But the best part is, after the news broke, one by one as the day continued those eleven friends de-friended him while the journalists of the world watched and snickered. Justice in action! The internet’s revenge is swift, ruthless, and public.

From the Guardian:

There was speculation he could have been trying to prove himself to the bank, to create his own spectacular method of making profits or simply prove the system could be broken. Union officials warned he might have been caught in a quest for a good bonus…”If he was a genius, then we didn’t spot it, ” said Dominique Chabert, his university tutor. He was “not a student who made an impression on his year, either in a good or bad way”.

Apparently France’s tolerance for tragically mediocre Walter Mitty figures is less than its tolerance for Mickey Rourke.

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