When the French bank lost 4.7 billion euros, where did the money go? Who has got it?

Lost in stocks and shares gambling..

Money grabbing stock brokers have got it.

Basically the trader started making legal bets on the market last year (this is totally within his job description) He was betting that it would go down. BUT he bet with more money then he was allowed to use.(which he got through some loopholes in that bank's system) So fast forward to the end of the year and he had been right and made a ton of money (more then he should have had he only bet as much as he was allowed to) so he started creating loss positions (made the opposite bets) to get rid of some of the profits. However he didn't expect the market to continue to plunge as far as it did in January.
Then the bank found out and started selling off the bets on the open market as a way to stop the mounting losses. By the time they had sold off the bets the resulting money at the end of the day was less then he had started out with and thus there was a loss.

Now all the things that the trader did and then the bank did were commonly accepted methods of Options trading (you make bets and pay a premimum to the person who you are betting with) but he used too much money and then had to cover his tracks.

The money went out to the people who took the bets or bought out the positions but there is probably not some small group of individuals out there who are laughing all the way to the bank. Instead there are thousands of options traders who participated without even knowing they were connected to this. They didnt do anything wrong they just happened to buy pieces of these things.

Now in hindsight the "bad guy" here probably would have averted being marked the guy who excecuted the single biggest fraud in banking history if he had simply come clean when he made the windfall profits. He would have probably been fired but "nicely" as the bank would have probably been the only one out there who made a staggering profit in these tough times.

The real question here is what happened to all of the loss bets, did he maybe send some of them his way to a small account outside the bank and was planning on slipping away with his small fortune? This has yet to be answered as the bank now has to go through all of his transactions to find out where the money went.

In financial transactions, money is never lost, it is transferred. It seems that Societe Generale's trader entered into contracts speculating on the movement of asset prices. This is not unusual in itself, only that the trader allegedly acted outside of his personal authority at the bank and allegedly attempted to hide this fact. It seems that Societe Generale was warned by third parties about the size of the trades, but seems to have done very little to combat the problem (?) Also, it is a testament to the bank's probable poor internal procedures and control that it failed to notice the size of the trades. The counterparties to the transactions (i.e. the parties that "bet" in the opposite direction) are the winners, but it is not fair to call them greedy. They have taken a risk (probably based on expert analysis of the markets) and this risk has resulted in reward for them. This is how a capitalist economy works.

Brokers who are grinning like Cheshire cats.

me and they cant have it back cos i spent it all

hmm... i'm not into stocks all that much, but from my general knowledge of them i would think it either went to taxes, the government took it, or they were robbed.
that's all i got.

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