All That Glitters: the Fall of Barings - Softcover

John Gapper; Nicholas Denton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 024113756X ISBN 13: 9780241137567

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 1996

Synopsis

From the back "When a single ‘rogue trader’ brought down Barings, Britain’s oldest merchant bank, it was two Financial Times journalists who discovered crucial details about Nick Leeson’s secret account and the rescue talks with the Sultan of Brunei. In this book they tell the full story.Even in the 1980s, the cosy patrician clique at Baring Brothers could not control Baring Securities, where young and thrusting children of the Thatcher revolution were storming into new markets and generating unprecedented profits. Communications and lines of accountability eventually became so confused that directors earning huge bonuses blindly transferred £700 million into Leeson’s black hole. This vivid narrative cuts through the strange jargon of straddles and strangles, ‘rocket scientists’ and ‘gamma geeks’, to uncover vicious power struggles, towering egos and monumental incompetence."

About this title

From the Inside Flap

How was Nick Leeson allowed to bring down Barings? How could the City's oldest merchant bank be destroyed, apparently almost overnight, by the reckless gambles of a single trader?    Leeson has given his own account, but All That Glitters tells for the first time the full enthralling story. It lays bare the bizarre and dazzling world of modern financial markets, where national boundaries have been broken by traders who gamble millions of pounds daily, and the ambition, greed and carelessness of those who are meant to control and benefit from the trade.    This book explains how Leeson was drawn into creating fictitious profits in a misguided attempt to impress those around him, and how an entire organization fooled itself into believing that he had discovered the secret of making money at will, in a way that none of its rivals could emulate. The narrative follows Barings from its foundations as a merchant bank in the eighteenth century through its rapid growth in the 1980s, to the moment of hubris when it appeared to have recaptured for the City of London a place as a leading force in international finance.    The authors conducted hundreds of interviews with almost everyone who was intimately involved. They had exclusive access to unpublished letters and records and to extraordinarily gripping telephone transcripts from the final deays, making All That Glitters the definitive, most lucid and compelling account of how a British bank allowed a twenty-seven-year-old to fool them into thinking that he was the most sophisticated and daring trader of them all - until he brought it tumbling around their ears.     As compelling as the best thriller, All That Glitters is a magnificent work of investigation and reconstruction, taking us behind headlines which seemed as exotic as myth or fairy-tale to show how a venerable British institution was brought to grief. 

From the Back Cover

When a single rogue trader brought down Barings, Britain's oldest merchant bank, it was two Financial Times journalists who discovered crucial details about Nick Leeson's secret account and the rescue talks with the Sultan of Brunei. In this superb book, they tell the full story.

Edition details

• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton Ltd
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 024113756X
• ISBN 13: 9780241137567
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384