Rogue Trader: How I Brought Down Barings Bank and Shook the Financial World

Leeson, Nick, Whitley, Edward

ISBN 10: 0316518565 / ISBN 13: 9780316518567

Published by Little Brown & Co, 1996

About this Item

Seller Inventory # Abebooks65807

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Rogue Trader: How I Brought Down Barings Bank and Shook the Financial World
• Publisher: Little Brown & Co
• Publication Date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0316518565
• ISBN 13: 9780316518567
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Few news stories have grabbed the world's headlines quite like the collapse of Barings merchant bank in late February 1995.
Trusted with the finances of royalty, aristocracy, and major corporations for more than two hundred years, Barings had apparently been brought down by the covert trading activities of just one man, leaving the bank with losses of over $1 billion.
Rogue Trader takes us from Leeson's humble beginnings as the son of a plasterer to the very heart of the cutthroat empire he made his own: SIMEX, the Singapore money market that witnessed both Leeson's phenomenal rise to prominence and his devastating fall from grace. It is a portrait of organized chaos, revealing not only the frenetic culture of the trading pit, but also the ways in which Leeson dealt with his losses, avoided detection, and became the object of an international manhunt that sparked the most extraordinary news story in recent years.
Pressure, pace, error: Leeson reveals the inside story of this amazing chain of events. With a narrative as crisp as any thriller, Rogue Trader is the fascinating account of a man shaped by events that proved to be beyond his control.

Reviews

From the opening of the "error account" that allowed him to bury $827 million in losses, to the failure of an audit of his books to detect the cover-up, Leeson in his version of the events that precipitated the fall of Barings Bank blames the stupidity of the institution's hierarchy. Indeed, putting an untested 28-year-old in charge of a trading desk (the Singapore International Monetary Exchange) seems, at best, ill advised. Though Leeson's glib tale of the plucky lower-class kid who fools the fobs that bank the queen's money is clearly designed to win support, his assessment of Barings jibes with Judith Rawnsley's Total Risk (LJ 2/1/96), to date the only reliable work on the downfall of the 200-year-old bank. Despite this, Leeson's recitation of his crimes is the work of a flimflam man. Recommended for collections already owning Rawnsley's title.
Adam Mazmanian, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.