February 2, 2008 (Nouvelle Solidarité), PARIS – The leading Swiss daily Le Temps, which interviewed LaRouche associate Jacques Cheminade last week on his new Bretton Woods proposal, offered an original lead on the British-orchestrated destabilization of the French bank Societe Generale. Le Temps interviewed Martin Baker, a writer and financial journalist, who two weeks ago wrote an essay called "Meltdown". In the great tradition of Huxley and Orwell, it tells the story of how a French trader "provokes the implosion of the financial system!" Baker, a trained lawyer, who worked between 1990 and 1997 as a journalist of the financial pages for the Paris-based International Herald Tribune (published jointly by the Washington Post and New York Times, later ran the financial website TheStreet.com and is married to Nicola Horlick, nicknamed the "superwoman of the City of London". Not surprisingly, Horlick was formally an employee of the Societe Generale…
Le Temps asked Baker: "Your book tells the story of a French trader who gets massive losses and then covers them up. The intrigue gets more complicated later with a world conspiracy to destroy capitalism. This was a premonition…" Baker: "I wrote thirteen versions of this book over eleven years before publishing the twelfth one. But what is unbelievable, is the fact that in the twelfth version, the hero invests via a vehicle named Delta Quadrant, while Jerome Kerviel invested in Delta One. That is really strange. The reason I wrote this was because I suspect something similar happened thirteen or fourteen years ago with the French banking system. The head of the derivative products of a large French bank, who everybody considered to be like a god and who was a genius in mathematics, disappeared one day in a cloud of smoke. One day, the bank announced he resigned by mutual consent. I asked myself: how could this happen? I then imagined a story where huge losses had been dissimulated."
Baker then, as an insider, exposes the insane behavior of traders: "In the City of London, it is a reasonable estimate that half of the traders are regular users of cocaine. They like strong alcohol and love immediate sex. There out for immediate gratification. Their social life reflects their professional life: eat, kill and advance."
Le Temps asked Baker why his story and the events and the Societe Generale debacle take place in France?
Baker: "One of the reasons these things happened in France comes from the reigning hostility against Anglo-Saxon capitalism. I see in it a charming intellectual arrogance, but unjustified. I love a lot the French system, but it’s antipathy against Anglo-Saxon capitalism goes with an intense pride of its mathematical capacities which goes back to people like [the nineteenth century mathematician] Henri Poincare. The idea of discovering some kind of mathematical model which can tame the "beast" of Anglo-Saxon capitalism is viewed favorably. The French want to beat the system. And that leads them to their own destruction."
Le Temps: "Why?"
Baker: "This attitude goes against the profound conviction in the Anglo-Saxon world that you can’t beat the market. The French reflex is to say: yes, we can, our best mathematicians are going to find a solution. That’s why, in the French spirit, derivatives are considered to be something special. Yes, Kerviel was not a star, but he worked on these products…"
Jacques Cheminade’s view is that the British are trying to use French Cartesianism to destroy the French national identity. Cheminade urges the institutions of the presidency and the French political class to recognize that LaRouche’s and his proposal for a new Bretton Woods are the only effective way to save the French nation-state from destruction.
