Last week, in what the Paris-based bank Société Générale labeled “exceptional fraud,” rogue bank trader Jerome Kerviel allegedly lost $7.1 billion worth of bank money. But the problems don’t end there.

As the story broke, theTrumpet.com asked, “If a lone rogue trader … was able to cook the books for over a year to the tune of $7.1 billion at one of the world’s most well-known banks without anyone noticing, what other dirty little secrets could the banking sector be covering up? Could there be more subprime and other related investments hiding in banks’ books ready to implode?”

Since then, more shocking information has emerged from representatives of the French bank. As it turns out, Kerviel cooked the books to the tune of $73 billion. That’s right—billion!

Bank officials now admit that Kerviel entered positions with bank money amounting to $73 billion. To put that number in context, you could have bought the whole bank, which is France’s second-largest, for a comparatively measly $50 billion. Expressed another way, Kerviel had, without authorization, added enough bets to bank books to give each man, woman and child in the whole country of France more than $1,100.

Making matters worse for officials at the beleaguered bank, according to BusinessWeek, Société Générale had received multiple warnings over several months about Kerviel. Warnings even came from the bank’s own accounting and risk departments, as well as from Eurex, the derivates exchange jointly operated by Deutsche Börse and swx Swiss Exchange stock markets.

Apparently because Kerviel’s bets were making money over the past year, his action failed to stir much of a response. According to sources at the bank, Kerviel was in line to receive a $450,000 bonus had his bets not turned south. It was only after the trader started suffering losses that the bank initiated an investigation.

Now some analysts fear that the French bank may not be able to survive the losses and the stain on its reputation.

“SocGen may have been terminally wounded by the loss, and its investment banking/equity derivative franchise may be irreparable damaged,” says Jean-Pierre Lambert, an analyst at the London-based firm Keefe, Bruyette & Woods.

Such a high-profile and extravagant case of fraud is also the last thing the global banking system needs. Over the past half year, continual and massive unexpected write-downs from some of the largest banks across the United States and Europe have kept investors guessing as to the real creditworthiness of the world’s most prestigious financial institutions.

According to some sources, even the banks don’t trust each other, causing interbank lending to severely constrict. Government-sponsored central banks have been forced to step in to keep the banking sector from collapsing.

$73 billion worth of fraudulent positions, gone unnoticed for more than a year, will do little to restore banking confidence.

Making maters worse, investigators report that Kerviel claims that other traders also routinely made unauthorized trades at the bank.

If a junior trader at France’s second-largest bank, a bank worth only $50 billion, was able to unofficially put the bank on the hook for $73 billion, and nobody really noticed the fraud for over a year—and if, as Kerviel claims, unauthorized trading is far more commonplace than realized—maybe other banks have unnoticed problems too.

The Daily Reckoning even reports that rumors are now circulating that Kerviel was “just a fall guy,” and that a deal was cut with him “to cover up the bank’s losses elsewhere.”

For America, additional bookkeeping questions will only add insult to injury for an industry plagued by credibility problems. Before last year, the banking industry was one of America’s most envied and profitable. Now those same banks are having trouble just staying afloat.