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This heavy week of economic coverage was rounded out by another Hitting Home feature on CBS and a follow-up by ABC on Jerome Kerviel, the junior trader who lost $7bn of his employer's money in wrong-way stock market speculation. On CBS, Randall Pinkston told us that the climb in the price of an ounce of gold in the past three years from $400 to $900 has stimulated a new rush as ordinary people cash in their scrap household jewelry to be melted down and refined for sale as bullion.
ABC's Jim Sciutto reported that Societe Generale had to unwind Kerviel's positions on Monday as prices were already falling on global financial markets. Its massive selling helped push European stock markets down 6% in a single day while Wall Street was closed for Martin Luther King Day. So when the Federal Reserve Board cut its short-term interest rates to 3.5% Tuesday, that move could have been the final consequence of a chain reaction that was triggered by the secret gambling losses of a lone thirtysomething banker in Paris.
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