All The Latest Market Gossip

You got to hand it to the guys and girls over at Bear Stearns - at least their sense of humour remains intact, despite their ongoing trials. Rumour has it that staff in the US are now going around referring to their employer as 'the firm formerly known as Bear Stearns'!

And, as the credit crunch tightens and banks pull mortgage products like there's no tomorrow, one of our readers points out the rather apt holding music currently being played at an Royal Bank of Scotland Mortgage Centre - REM's 'Everybody Hurts'! Quite.

The New York Times reports that former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling's lawyer told an appeal court earlier this week that everything his client did whilst at the helm of the failed energy company was done with the benefit of the company in mind. Skilling is appealing his 24-year jail term. The problem is, of course, that in the end there weren't that many 'benefits' - thousands of job losses and $60bn of shareholders funds down the drain (including $2bn in employee pension plans).

And finally, The UK Times reports that SocGen's rogue trader Jerome Kerviel is thinking about suing the French bank for unfair dismissal! He apparently claims that his trading positions were profitable until SocGen stepped in with that great unwind - which caused losses of over $7bn. Kerviel is also thought to be miffed that the bank didn't have a face-to-face meeting with him before he was fired - something it is required to do under French law. The good news for SocGen, however, is that Kerviel doesn't appear to want his old job back. He has moved on to better things - book offers, film roles and the like.