By Ann Williams

1 ROGUE TRADER
Jerome Kerviel
Societe Generale trader

IN RETROSPECT, after the financial meltdown and all the revelations about the events of 2008, what Kerviel did seems almost quaint.

In January, the 31-year-old Societe Generale (SG) trader was charged with illegally racking up five billion euros (S$10 billion) in losses after placing derivatives bets worth more than US$50 billion (S$72 billion).

It was then the largest fraud in history, dwarfing the &pound827 million (S$1.8 billion) lost by Nick Leeson, who brought down British bank Barings in 1995.

SG said Kerviel was a rogue trader and claimed he worked alone and without its authorisation. Kerviel, in turn, told investigators that such practices were widespread and that getting a profit made the bosses turn a blind eye.

2 PREDATORY LENDER
Angelo Mozilo
Former CEO, Countrywide

THE growing business of turning mortgages into bundles of saleable securities prompted lenders to give virtually anyone a loan that they could resell at a profit while offloading the risk.

It also gave them incentive to mislead borrowers about what they could afford, what risks they were undertaking and, in some cases, the terms of the mortgage they were signing.

The poster boy of this racket was Mr Angelo Mozilo, a butcher's son, who built Countrywide into the largest United States mortgage lender.

Countrywide was among the biggest providers of high-risk sub-prime mortgages. But many others got into the game, as well. Sub-prime lending shot up from US$130 billion in 2000 to US$625 billion (S$904 billion) in 2005.

Mr Mozilo also became a symbol of Wall Street greed. Even as his business crumbled, he made US$121.5 million from cashing in his stock options.

3 MAESTRO NO MORE
Alan Greenspan
Former Fed chairman

THE US central bank's job, as one of Mr Greenspan's predecessors famously said, is to remove the punch bowl once the party really gets going.

As Fed chairman during the housing bubble, Mr Greenspan spiked the bowl instead, by keeping interest rates low and shunning regulation that let Wall Street bankers indulge in reckless risk-taking and greed.

In 2000, he rejected a proposal to examine the lending practices of banks and mortgage brokers. He also shrugged off suggestions that the ballooning market for exotic securities, known as derivatives, needed greater scrutiny. Perhaps most importantly, he never saw or warned that something was terribly amiss.

In testimony before Congress in October, a shaken Mr Greenspan said his faith in the self-correcting nature of free markets was misplaced. The admission came too late.

4 FALLEN WALL STREET TITAN
Richard Fuld
Former CEO of Lehman Brothers

THANKS to the economic meltdown, we now know that the decade's financial superstars walked off with huge bonuses they 'earned' by reckless risk-taking.

Wall Street firms created bundles of sub-prime mortgages and other toxic financial instruments, then peddled them as low-risk, high-return investments. These securities, and enormous side bets on them, fuelled the housing bubble and infected the global financial system.

Nearly all the big investment banks were culpable but Mr Fuld, who received as much as US$480 million (S$694 million) in compensation from 2000 to this year, receives special mention for taking risks that drove his 158-year-old institution into the ground.

Other banking titans whose names have been tarnished include Mr Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns, Mr Chuck Prince of Citigroup, Mr Stan O'Neal of Merrill Lynch and Sir Fred Goodwin of Royal Bank of Scotland.