There is an interesting piece in the FT this morning about the growing pressure on Marcel Ospel, chairman of UBS, over the bank’s cumulative $18bn write-down on US mortgage securities.

The article refers to his "reputation as a cold-blooded power broker". I have no inside knowledge of that but I do know that he has remarkable staying power.

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My column in the Financial Times this week compares Jérôme Kerviel of Société Générale with Tom Cruise. Yes, seriously. You can read it here and comment below.

On the plane on the way back from Davos to New York, I caught up with The Bourne Ultimatum, the Paul Greengrass-directed action thriller, starring Matt Damon.

Like many Hollywood films these days, it was a travelogue of countries as well as a drama. Madrid, Tangiers, Manhattan, Waterloo Station . . . it went to all the most glamorous spots.

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Further to my admiration for the supermarket in Davos that did not offer me a plastic bag, I note that it is only part of Switzerland’s green credentials.

Yale University’s environmental performance index, which was released at Davos, places Switzerland top of the league on factors including air pollution, water quality, greenhouse gas emissions per head etc. The study notes that wealth correlates closely with environmental performance: the richer you are the more you tend to care about such things.

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One further thought on le rogue trader, Jerome Kerviel of Societe Generale (further apologies for the lack of accents).

As I wrote before, there are striking similarities between him and Nick Leeson, the Barings rogue trader. The biggest relates to his motivation.

Both Leeson and Kerviel were lowly figures within their banks who were not supposed to be taking risks with their trading but seem to have started doing so in an effort to burnish their reputations - to make themselves into stars inside their banks.

This piece in the Wall Street Journal this morning rings lots of bells from the Barings case. Like Kerviel, Leeson was supposed to be carrying out routine, low-profile arbitrage trading but instead drifted into doing something different.

Kerviel appears to have been even more deluded than Leeson, who was actively encouraged by his bank to expand his activities because he appeared to be making a lot of money. Kerviel now claims to have been "tolerated" by SocGen; we shall see how much truth there is in that.

Outsiders often have a lot of difficulty understanding why a trader takes extreme risks and engages in fraud unless it is to make money. But I think they miss the point: status anxiety is an equally plausible motive.

Trading floors are not much different from school playgrounds. They are highly competitive places and people can sometimes do crazy things to impress others.

I am afraid I have been a bit distracted from my blogging duties in Davos by Jerome Kerviel, the rogue trader at Societe Generale (forgive me, but I do not know how to insert the many French accents required here in Typepad, which is our blog publishing tool).

Anyway, here is a column I wrote for Saturday’s FT to sum up the week at Davos. I hope to post some more things that emerged from the week over the next few days.

Here is a column I wrote for today’s Financial Times on the Societe Generale rogue trader. It brings back a few memories, since I wrote a book about the collapse of Barings with Nick Denton, who has since gone on to greater, or at least other, things.

I was looking forward to a somewhat more relaxed afternoon at the World Economic Forum this afternoon and popping in to listen to a couple of debates. Well, so much for that. Societe Generale’s rogue trader has grabbed all the attention and pinned me down in the media centre.

Here is a piece I have just written about the comparisons between this fraud and the one at Barings in 1995 which led to the bank’s collapse. It brings back old memories.

My column in the FT this week is tangentially related to Davos. It is about an absentee from this year’s World Economic Forum: Bill Clinton. You can read it here and post comments below.

One thing you can never accuse the secret service bodyguards who look after bigwigs in the US administration of is secrecy. They have been very hard to miss, or to escape, in Davos this week.

The most obtrusive presence has been that of Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state. Each time she passed through the Belvedere Hotel the security men and women shut down access to the lobby for 15 minutes.

I know this because I had to cool my heels twice when I was blocked from entering the lobby so the guards could establish the zone around Ms Rice. The second time, the lobby puzzlingly remained blocked even well after she had left. Eventually, Al Gore walked through it with his own guards.

I did gain some amusement from seeing one US security guard failing to get through the hotel’s metal detectors with his radio earpiece firmly in place. “I’m secret service,” he said irritatedly as the Swiss guards scanned him by hand.