All that Glitters: the Fall of Barings

From the back"When a single ‘rogue trader’ brought down Barings, Britain’s oldest merchant bank, it was two Financial Times journalists who discovered crucial details about Nick Leeson’s secret account and the rescue talks with the Sultan of Brunei. In this book they tell the full story.Even in the 1980s, the cosy patrician clique at Baring Brothers could not control Baring Securities, where young and thrusting children of the Thatcher revolution were storming into new markets and generating unprecedented profits. Communications and lines of accountability eventually became so confused that directors earning huge bonuses blindly transferred £700 million into Leeson’s black hole. This vivid narrative cuts through the strange jargon of straddles and strangles, ‘rocket scientists’ and ‘gamma geeks’, to uncover vicious power struggles, towering egos and monumental incompetence."