Talk of the town

Remember how Singapore was suddenly made famous by Nick Leeson in the financial market about 12 years ago? Well, someone out did him. That someone was a trader working in the second biggest bank of France, Societe Generale. He made his bank lost $7 billion (5 billion euro) by conducting rogue trading. This is definitely the hot topic in our office. See, we are a financial risk-management software company. And we are trying to figure out how this trader managed to cover and snow-ball his errors until this moment and at this amount. Most of us know of someone who is working in Societe Generale. Well, there goes their bonus as the bank lost a further 2 billion euros because of the sub-prime mortgage crisis in US.

On a brighter note, we were really glad that Jo-Wilfried Tsonga made it to the finals in the Asutralia Open. He defeated Nadal in 3 sets. Though I am no big tennis fan, we do have cable TV in the office common area. Everyone was pretending to get water, coffee, orange juice so as to catch a glimpse of the action. When it was the final set, most of us were glued to the TV. Tsonga was not known. His ranking was 38 and he managed to defeat the number 2 guy in tennis. We really hope he would do France proud as it had been many many years since a french made it to the finals of a Grand Slam.

Note: When I mentioned we, I was referring to my colleagues.

Today, there was a strike with the public service workers like teachers, nurses etc..... Against increase cost of living and low pay. Sarkozy promised to increase french purchasing power during election period. Now, he avoided talking about this subject in his speeches. The news were just speculating if he had secretly married his girlfriend. Yeah, the ex-model who had dated men around the globe including father and son. In BBC, there was an article on the dilemma of India for the visit of Sarkozy and his girlfriend. Should they share the same suite? What is the protocol for a visiting president bringing his girlfriend along? The president's communication team did a good job to steer more pressing issues aside for some juicy gossips about the president's personal live.

To end, Singapore Prime Minister came visiting in Paris. Reading from the news site in Singapore (sadly, I did not read about this in French site), he met up the president, foreign minister and prime minister of France. He invited all of them to come visit Singapore. This morning, I read in the free papers given at the metro station that Lee Hsien Long visited the Quai Branly museum with the ex-president Chirac. At last, Singapore is mentioned. How rare to hear about this small country over here.