When the satirical songwriter and performer Tom Lehrer was 38, he introduced his song about Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel by saying "It’s people like that who make you realize how little you’ve accomplished. It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years."
So ran my thoughts when I read this morning about Jerome Kerviel, a securities trader for a French bank whose securities trading has cost the bank more than $7 billion. He is a lad of 31. By the time I was 31 I had managed to lose about a millionth of that sum in the stock market, and no matter how hard I try, I will never catch up (down?) to Mr. Kerviel.