Billion Dollar Bath
The numbers are startling even after years of huge financial scandals. Eleven years. Thirty thousand unauthorized trades. $1.1 billion vanished. How could one trader lose an average of $400,000 every business day since 1984 and not draw attention? Iguchi’s deals weren’t even complicated, like the stock-index arbitrage with which Nicholas Leeson lost $1.4 billion for Barings, the British merchant bank, or the derivatives that helped drill a $1.7 billion hole in the investment fund of Orange County, Calif....