Episode Details

In 1995, Barings Bank collapsed because a trader controlled both the trading book and the back office. The industry spent the following year producing reports. Banks segregated trading from back office. The lesson was documented and filed. Seven years later, Allied Irish Banks lost $691 million to a trader in Baltimore who had read the same reports — and found the gap between the organizational fix and the functional reality it was supposed to create. John Rusnak didn't hide his losing positions in an error account. He manufactured fictitious FX options that appeared in the risk management system as hedges, suppressed the confirmation process that should have detected them, and presented a net exposure within authorized limits every month for five years. The back office was separate from the trading desk

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. It processed the documentation Rusnak provided without independently contacting the counterparties who had never agreed to the trades. This episode dissects the mechanism layer by layer: the legitimate FX options trading model, the three technical choices that made the fictitious hedges resistant to routine verification — Asian options, intrabank bookings, deferred premium structures — the specific degradation of the back office from verification function to recording function, and the single question that would have ended the fraud at any point between 1997 and 2002.