A financial professional works in the Goldman Sachs booth on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange April 16, 2010 in New York City. Goldman Sachs was charged with fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission over its marketing of a subprime mortgage product, sending its stock price sharply lower.Chris Hondros
Goldman Sachs banker Fabrice Tourre stands accused of being the latest scheming, morally bankrupt face of the banking industry. The 31-year-old Frenchman may in fact be much more ordinary.
Mr. Tourre will testify before the U.S. Senate on Tuesday. He is the only Goldman employee named in a fraud charge against the bank itself over the way a complex financial product was created and marketed.
The way he presents himself could have a lasting impact on the future of the world's most powerful investment bank and help set the tone for the financial reform currently winding its way through Congress.
A product of France's elite schooling system, Mr. Tourre made clear in e-mails to his girlfriend as the financial crisis took shape that he was conscious of the destructive power of the complex credit products he peddled.
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The 2007 e-mails, some released by his accusers the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and others by his employer, show the then 28 year-old Fabrice mixing love talk with the prospects for the subprime lending on which the products he sold were based -- often in a mix of French and English.
In one series, in which he entreats Frenchwoman Marine Serres to "wake up gently my love," Mr. Tourre also predicts that "les pauvres petits (poor little) subprime borrowers vont pas faire de vieux os" -- which means they won't last long.
He also considers in sober terms the prospect of moving from New York to a new job in London as a way to avoid the total collapse of the sector.
The words of "Fab Fabrice" -- as he calls himself in one e-mail released by the SEC -- might as easily be those a cautious, if ambitious young man as those of the high-rolling risk taker characterized by tabloid newspaper reports.
Friends say the Tourre who made his way out of middle class Parisian suburbs into Ecole Centrale de Paris, one of the elite universities of France, was modest and diligent.
He rarely went to parties and was not sure whether he wanted to enter finance. He played football and studied hard.
"Other people, when they get into Centrale, take their foot off the accelerator. Not Fabrice Tourre," said one.
Mr. Tourre entered the highly competitive Louis-le-Grand school in Paris in his late teens. Louis-le-Grand churns out students who go on to pull France's political, intellectual and economic levers. Alumni include the 18th century revolutionary Maximilien de Robespierre, writer and libertine the Marquis de Sade, and former president Jacques Chirac.
The school, targeted by Goldman Sachs for trainee programs according to one source close to the establishment, was strictly for the very hard working.
"(Louis-le-Grand) is to this day the most stressful, intense and terrifying experience of my life," said one former student.
"No-one had a social life. No-one had a girlfriend. No-one thought you would ever have a job where you talked to another human being."
Mr. Tourre went from there to the Ecole Centrale, one of the country's top "Grandes Ecoles" which turns out students focused on concepts and mathematical equations -- ideal fodder for the financial sector.
"Look at the profile of French financiers in the City of London or in New York, in general they have all studied at a `grande ecole', whether an engineering school, business school or Sciences Po (political science)," said Stephane Rambosson, managing partner at advisory and search firm Veni Partners.
This focus on quantitative skills is evident too in Mr. Tourre's e-mails. Even as he seems aware that he has created a financial instrument that could come crashing down, he marvels at its conceptual applications.
In one e-mail he calls the product "pure intellectual masturbation" and "something absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical."
Still, his e-mails reveal flashes of humour and humanity.
"It's like Frankenstein turning against his own inventor," he writes of the products he was selling.
Mr. Tourre was raised in a comfortable but obscure suburb of Paris. His parents' white stucco house lies in a gated enclave in a leafy suburb a short drive outside Paris.
His last known address, a non-descript two bedroom London apartment, was described in a British newspaper article by Mr. Tourre's own landlord as "nice, but not that nice."
Friends say that even after Mr. Tourre went to Goldman Sachs he retained loyalty to his parents and his home.
"Some would have spent their bonus from Goldman Sachs on a Porsche to show off, but Fabrice instead spent it on buying a house for his parents," said one person who was Mr. Tourre's neighbour in the student residence at the Ecole Centrale.