On 5th March 1995 Dutch banking and insurance group ING bought Barings for £1 and assumed liabilities of over $600m.
According to some McKinsey research presented by Mark Lawrence at a PRMIA event I attended in London on 18th December 2006, based on a sample of more than 350 operational loss events, normalized for industry performance, the decline in market capitalisation
that can be expected after an actual loss is 12x the actual loss after 120 days.
This would mean that in about 4 months SocGen's market cap, currently c. €32.641bn, will have declined by 12x €4.9bn, or €58.8bn - which, oh dear, isn't possible.
So, in the meantime, anyone got €1 to spare?