Nick Leeson - the main anti-hero of the century
When studying the stories of successful people, it is very important not only to absorb the spirit of the winner, but to study the mistakes that
one way or another could change the lives of these people.
The story of Nick Leeson is an excellent example of how banal greed and fear led to irreparable consequences, and this is not an ordinary story of a bankrupt, but a problem of a national scale, because of which many UK investors said goodbye to their savings forever.
Nick Leeson was born in 1967 in the secluded town of Watford. The seed was very ordinary and did not stand out for any financial benefits, since the main breadwinner, her father, worked as an ordinary plasterer.
Actually, it was the father who hatched plans to improve Nick’s future and wanted to make his son a builder, or more precisely an engineer.
However, from a very young age, Nick saw himself as a financier who would move large amounts of capital. The most interesting thing is that despite his dream related to finance, he found mathematics very difficult, and he regularly failed various tests.
Starting a financial career
Upon graduating from college, Nick was incredibly lucky because he was immediately hired to work at one of the oldest and most reputable banks in England, Barings. A very young young man begins to actively engage in his professional activities, which concerned the execution of exchange contracts.
Life began to smooth out around him so successfully that Nick, in the same bank, finds his life partner, whom he eventually marries.
Nick Leeson simply coped with his duties perfectly, and no one understood the bank’s document flow as well as Leeson. Therefore, the management very quickly noticed a promising boy and decided to send him to a subsidiary company located in Singapore.
Of course, at first glance this does not look like an increase, but it was the Singapore subsidiary that was engaged in trading on the stock exchange, or more precisely, that was engaged in so-called hedging with a guaranteed income. Nick's main task was to carry out orders from central management and monitor the market situation.
First successes
Less than a year later, Nick brought his bank over 8.8 million pounds, and a year later this amount exceeded over 22 million. As profitability increased, Nick's financial income increased, and within just two years he became the chief broker in the Singapore branch and became accountable only to the central office.
Star fever and the first glimpses of greed
Nick Leeson, having suffered from star fever, decided to independently move away from the accepted trading system developed by the bank and risk larger sums. In his book, Nick writes that he simply wanted to curry favor with the bank and bring him more money.
In fact, everything turned out the other way around and in the first year, after his idea, he brought losses to Barings in the amount of 2 million pounds. However, due to his skill in handling the organization's documents, he was able to hide the resulting loss. After everything was hidden, Nick begins to be overcome by greed and a thirst to win back his losses, which leads to the loss of another 21 million pounds.
However, even in this case, thanks to manipulation, the largest bank does not find out about its huge losses, but in return simply pays a huge salary to its best employee.
Fatal mistake. Escape from the country
The longer Nick Leeson worked and hid his losses, the more he wanted to win back. A fatal mistake that forever changed the fate of thousands of ordinary people happened in 1995. Then Nick decided to buy the Nikkei index, but a short time later an earthquake occurred which immediately collapsed this index.
Blinded by greed and the desire to win back, Nick continues to buy the falling index in the hope that he will be able to turn the market around. As a result, the market turned it around and in the first month after such an experiment loses $619 million, and the total loss was 827 million pounds.
Realizing that there is no way out, Nick flees the country, leaving only a fax with an apology to his boss. When the management began to analyze what was happening, it turned out that the bank was already bankrupt, and because of the actions of the swindler, thousands of people were left without deposits.
As a result, Nick did not enjoy freedom for long and a week later he was detained and received a sentence from the Singapore Themis of six and a half years in prison.