The music stopped and everyone found a seat. As party games go, the version of musical chairs played out in Europe yesterday lacked that frisson of excitement created by uncertainty. In Paris, Daniel Bouton survived as chairman of Société Générale; Mervyn King was told to carry on running the Bank of England for a further five years; and in Zurich, Marcel Ospel remained at the head of UBS.

As if thumbing his nose at his shareholders watching from the sidelines, MrOspel took the running total of sub-prime mortgage losses at the Swiss bank to $18 billion (£9.1 billion) as he announced a further $4 billion in writedowns less than a month after he admitted the bank could not assess its exposure to the rotten assets in its books.

The upside was that no one was disappointed, left unhappy, unloved and without a job. Apart from the shareholders, the taxpayers and people lower down the chain of command who were not invited to play. At Société Générale, the supervisor of Jérôme Kerviel, the “rogue trader”, has been suspended and at UBS, Mr Ospel has shed senior lieutenants, its financial and risk officers and Peter Wuffli, the chief executive who resigned in July.

It is all rather different from Wall Street, where boards lost little time in removing the captain from the bridge when his ship was holed by a sub-prime iceberg.

There is a common thread that links the continuing service of the three European bank chiefs which goes beyond timing. They have all been subject to political pressure to do the “honourable” thing. The Bank of England Governor has survived bruising criticism from the Treasury Select Committee over his handling of the Northern Rock fiasco, while Mr Ospel is widely disliked for his bumptious management style which ill suits the conservative world of Swiss banking. But it is Mr Bouton who deserves the survival medal; his resignation was demanded by none other than the President of France. That shows courage on the part of the SocGen board but Mr Bouton is by no means off the hook. The Bank of France has asked why risk controls appeared to have broken down at SocGen and an independent audit committee, of which Mr Bouton is not a member, will investigate the “mechanism of the fraud” by which Mr Kerviel created a bonfire with SocGen's balance sheet.

It may be that these three men have survived because everyone knows that the problems inherent in our banking system lie much deeper than individuals. Mr Kerviel's spectacular antics served to obscure a €2 billion (£1.49 billion) writedown on SocGen's sub-prime exposure, a loss that would have caused the French bank extreme embarrassment.

If the SocGen auditors want to understand the mechanism of Mr Kerviel's deception, they could do worse than listen to what he says in his testimony to the courts. He has already recounted instances in which his superiors must have been aware that he was breaking the rules as he traded beyond his authority, notably his reporting of a €55 million trading profit in 2007, an amount he could not have legitimately earned within his operating limits.

Mr Kerviel's blunt explanation is a parable for our times: “I was making cash, so the signals were not so worrying. As long as we won and it didn't show, nothing was said.”

Times Recommends

• Darling under pressure on record public debt
• Mortgage drought deepens on 32% lending fall
• Oil prices firm after 10% drop to below $130