Episode Details

A 28-year-old with no university degree, whose first banking job was sorting paper checks, single-handedly bankrupted the United Kingdom's oldest merchant bank, a 233-year-old institution that managed the Queen's personal wealth. Barings lost 827 million pounds, and it all began with a desperate attempt to hide one relatively tiny error. Nick Leeson became the world's original rogue trader, and his story is less about finance than about panic.

This episode follows the working-class fixer who knew the bank's plumbing so well he could reroute it, the fatal decision to let him run both the trading desk and the back office that audited it, and the infamous 88888 error account where losses compounded in the dark until the Kobe earthquake blew the doors off. It ends with prison, a cancer diagnosis, and the absurd final twist: the man who broke Barings now works as an investigator of financial misconduct.

• From check-sorting clerk to Singapore chief: the back-office education that taught him every blind spot
• Grading your own exam: the separation-of-duties failure at the heart of the collapse
• Account 88888: how a small hidden error metastasized into 827 million pounds
• The Kobe earthquake: the unhedgeable event that exposed everything in days
• Poacher turned gamekeeper: prison, redemption, and the question of where today's error accounts hide