How did one man manage to destroy Britain’s oldest merchant bank?
The story of Nick Leeson, the infamous rogue trader, shows the dangers of too much power in finance. In the early 1980s, Nick Leeson got his first job as a bank clerk. This was followed by jobs with other banks, ending up with Barings, the oldest merchant bank in the UK, where he became a trader. He was appointed manager of operations in Singapore and began making millions for Barings by betting on the future direction of the Nikkei Index (stock market index for the Tokyo Stock Exchange). Leeson had a salary of £50,000 with bonuses of up to £150,000. By 1993, a year after moving to Asia, Leeson had made more than £10m – about 10% of Barings’ total profit for that year. But in 1994, his luck began to run out. By autumn that year, the losses stood at £208 million, though he actually recorded a profit of over £100 million. Leeson carried on trading in an effort to get himself out of the financial mess, and incredibly managed to hide the problem through manipulating the accounts. Finally B
