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 (i.e., Chapter 11 bankruptcy). He was
shocked, but Leeson 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.
Barings’ internal guideline was to post discrepancies to a special account,
called the “88888 Account.” That way, the bank’s books would balance, discrepancies
would be isolated and dealt with separately, and the bank could
make its regulatory filings without delay. The bank intended for these discrepancies
to be recorded and closed out within a day, but Leeson realized
that Barings’ internal guidelines were not followed.
Leeson did such a good job cleaning up the back-office problems in Indonesia
that the bank promoted him. His rise after that was meteoric. In
January 1992, Barings assigned Leeson to its newly opened Singapore
branch; shortly thereafter, he became head of derivatives trading at Barings’
Singapore office, Barings Futures Singapore (BFS). Leeson’s rise to prominence
was reflected in his annual bonuses, which were more than twice as
large as his annual salary.4
While in Singapore, Leeson focused his trading activities on futures contracts
in three major markets: the Japanese Nikkei 225 stock index, 10-year
Japanese government bonds, and euro-yen deposits. Because they were
traded simultaneously on the Osaka Securities Exchange (OSE) and the
Singapore International Monetary Exchange (SIMEX), Leeson’s job eventually
became one of taking advantage of arbitrage opportunities between the
two markets. But Leeson was not just arbitraging, and between July 1992
and February 1995 (about two and a half years), he incurred losses of over
$1 billion. How was this possible?
While he was working on reconciling the discrepancies in Indonesia,
Leeson learned that the discrepancies account (the “88888 Account”) did
not appear in reports used to control traders. Not surprisingly, they did go
into other reports, such as position statements to the exchanges for margin5
calculations, but internally, this information was prepared less frequently,
and it went through different channels to employees at the bank who had
little familiarity with trading.
For many types of financial transactions and banking operations, there
are temporary imbalances. Cash management systems often allow intra-day
overdrafts, and these overdrafts can be large. For instance, a client may
send out wire transfers every morning and receive incoming wire transfers
every afternoon or may make transfers from different time zones. Every
cash management account is supposed to balance at the end of the business
day, and if a customer’s account shows an overdraft, the amount is supposed
to be less than the customer’s credit limit. In that same spirit, it is logical
that securities trading systems should allow overdrafts that match the
length of the delivery period for securities. For example, U.S. stockbrokers
allow their customers to sell a stock and then immediately use the proceeds
to buy a different one even though the funds from the sale will not arrive
until several days later. The customer’s account is potentially in overdraft,
CONTENT HIGHLIGHT 7.1
What Is Margin?
Derivative contracts, such as futures and short
options, require brokers (i.e., the clearing members
of an exchange’s clearing house) and investors/speculators
to post initial margin, which
is usually a fixed dollar amount per contract
and represents a very small percent of the
overall value. Futures and option contracts are
agreements that are directly between a clearing
member (e.g., broker) and the clearinghouse.
As a result, there are separate margin
requirements for the broker relative to the
clearinghouse and for the customer relative to
the clearinghouse. The exchange sets minimum
customer margin requirements, but brokers are
allowed to charge customers amounts in excess
of this minimum. The minimum exchangeset
margin requirement depends on factors
such as price volatility (e.g., worst daily movement)
and general market liquidity.
Margin is not really a down payment on the
security as much as it is a performance bond
that ensures the broker and exchange that the
contract will be settled in due course. Initial
margin can be posted in cash or acceptable
security (e.g., cash, Treasury bonds, Treasury
notes, Treasury bills, and letters of credit), and it
is held by the broker in a customer-segregated
account. By law, brokers are required to hold
customer margin money in an account separate
from their operating funds.
Derivative contracts are repriced daily, with
the winners being paid from the losers’ margin
account. This process is called marking to market.
Margin accounts can be depleted by adverse
price fluctuations, so the exchange also
sets the maintenance margin level. If a margin
account falls below the exchange-determined
maintenance margin level, the customer must
replenish the margin account to the level set by
the initial margin requirement.
Marking to market ensures the contract
holder and the clearinghouse that sufficient
funds will be available to cover any loss resulting
from the change in price of the derivative
instrument. Assurances such as this are necessary
when you consider that the margin requirements
are as low as 5% of the contract’s
face value. If everything runs smoothly, the
clearinghouse should have a perfectly matched
book, with losers paying winners on a daily basis
from their margin accounts. As a result, counterparty
credit risk in this market should be very low.
At the Chicago Board of Trade, the Board of
Trade Clearing Corporation (BOTCC) calculates
margin requirements for both clearing
members and their customers twice per trading
day—once during the day and once at the
end of the day. Clearing members must meet
their end-of-the-day margin requirements by
6:40 A.M. on the following business day.6
because if the proceeds from the sale did not arrive, the customer would still
have to pay for the purchased shares.
Big gaps can form between what clients have and what they owe, and
these temporary imbalances pose risks. Even if these imbalances arise and
are resolved in the normal course of business (and thus seem innocuous),
they can still do harm. For one thing, discrepancies introduce delays in rec-
ognizing exposures, but equally important, they create opportunities for
clever and unscrupulous employees to figure out how to take advantage of
the permissive treatment of temporary imbalances. Nick Leeson was certainly
both clever and unscrupulous.
Barings had strict trading limits and believed that it was diligently monitoring
all its traders to make sure they did not exceed their limits, but the
bank’s systems were not prepared for the level of fraud and misrepresentation
that Leeson committed, and Barings was not aware of the secret passageway
Leeson found to its crown jewels. In July 1992, shortly