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In 1995, a single 28-year-old trader brought down Barings Bank, the oldest merchant bank in the United Kingdom and the personal bank of the Queen. This episode unpacks how Nick Leeson, working from Singapore with control over both the front and back office, hid mounting losses in a secret error account until they reached 1.4 billion dollars and destroyed a 200-year-old institution.

Rather than a cartoon villain, Leeson emerges as a human figure trapped in an escalating web of his own making, enabled by a banking culture that prized profit over compliance. The story walks through the mechanics of derivatives, margin, and the doubling strategy that worked once and then failed catastrophically, before tracing his prison sentence, cancer diagnosis, and unlikely reinvention.

The fatal structural flaw of letting one person run trading and accounting
How error account 88888 turned a small mistake into a quarter-billion-pound hole
The Martingale doubling strategy and why it briefly saved him
How the Kobe earthquake of 1995 detonated his short straddle positions
Leeson's later life as a CEO, author, and corporate fraud investigator