Nicholas (“Nick”) William Leeson was relaxing at a luxury
resort in Malaysia when he heard that Barings Bank PLC, 1
Britain’s oldest bank, had lost $1.2 billion (£860 million) and
was in administration. He was
shocked, but he should not have been: it was his massive
speculative losses on the futures market over a brief
three-year period that wiped out the net worth of this venerable
bank.
Leeson worked at the Singapore branch of Barings Bank
PLC, the blue-blooded British merchant bank founded in
1763 that catered to royalty and was at the pinnacle of the
London financial world. Among its many accomplishments
over the centuries, Barings financed both the Louisiana Purchase
in 1803 and the Napoleonic Wars. But the road to success
was not always smooth. The bank endured both wars
and depressions, and it overcame near-bankruptcy in 1890,
surviving only because it was bailed out at the last minute
by the Bank of England. In spite of these sporadic periods of
turmoil, Barings was always one of the most well-placed and highly regarded players in London’s financial hub. How
ironic that this centuries-old bank would be toppled by one
man operating out of Barings’ remote Singapore affiliate.
Leeson was the chief trader for Barings’ Singapore affiliate,
dealing mainly in futures contracts on both the Nikkei 225
index2 and 10-year Japanese government bonds. Due to his
huge trading profits, Leeson earned a reputation among
Barings’ management in London, Tokyo, and Singapore as a
star performer, and he was given virtually free rein. Many
of Barings Bank’s top management believed that Leeson
possessed an innate feel for the markets, but the story of
this rogue trader reveals that he had nothing of the sort.
How, one wonders, could Barings’ management have been
so seriously mistaken and for so long?
This chapter addresses two main questions about the
Barings collapse: why did the bank give Leeson so much
discretionary authority to trade, allowing him to operate
without any effective trading restraints by managers and
internal control systems; and what trading strategy did
Leeson employ to lose so much in such a short time?
Nick Leeson (Exhibit 7.1) came from humble origins compared to most of
Barings’ officers. He had no family ties to the nobility, did not attend Eton,
and did not serve in the Coldstream Guards. The son of a Watford plasterer,
Leeson’s first job at Barings was as a clerk, but he rose swiftly. His big break
came when he was sent to the Barings’ Indonesian office to sort out a tangled mess in the back office.3 The Indonesia office had a large number of
stock trades that did not reconcile, because the trading volume on the Indonesian
stock exchange had grown so fast that the procedures for delivering
stock certificates could not keep up with the volume. The bank had
hundreds of small discrepancies between the stock certificates it held and
the certificates it was supposed to hold. The bank’s stock trading business
was profitable, and most of the discrepancies were small. Sooner or later the
vast majority of these discrepancies would be resolved as the paperwork finally
caught up with the backlog. It was Leeson’s job to sort out the problems
in Indonesia so branch operations ran smoothly.