Fabulous Fab

I don't suppose it is too much of a stretch to infer that the reason that the SEC started its Goldman-hunt with the Abacus case is that it gave them an excuse to include what must be the mother of all dumb emails:

"More and more leverage in the system, the whole building is about to collapse anytime now...only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab[rice Tourre]...standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all the implications of these monstruosities!!!"

For his inadvertent success at viral marketing, Fab certainly stands as the Susan Boyle of high finance. But I suspect that the more fitting analog would be his namesake, Fabrice de Dongo, wide-eyed and clueless, the anti-hero of Stendahl's last novel The Charterhouse of Parma--the one who lived through the Battle of Waterloo and didn't even know he was there. As the bewitching Gina tells him:

'[V]ous avez trop de feu pour les âmes prosaïque.'

Go get 'em, Fab, no prosaic soul for you.