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, (หน้า 197)