The definitive, classic account of the fall of the House of Baring and the ultimate rogue trader Nick Leeson. John Gapper, associate editor of the Financial Times, and his co-author Nick Denton, now founder of Gawker Media, interviewed the major players involved in the collapse of one of England's oldest banks. All That Glitters reveals the Faustian deal struck between the whizz-kid traders who seemed to be bringing in huge profits and the grandees who were happy to pocket them without asking too many questions. For the first time, the actions and motives of Nick Leeson and all the participants are explained, including the final days when politicians and bankers made a last-ditch attempt to save the bank.
All That Glitters: The Fall of Barings
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"The book that has most fascinated me is All That Glitters, densely researched, excellently told. With the energy and fascination of Victorian fiction, it's probably the best modern variant of The Way We Live Now - the Trollope novel that seems to come closest to our curious times." - Malcolm Bradbury. The Independent, Best Books of 1996.
"Lays serious claim to the tag 'definitive', and it reveals for the first time that Leeson's frauds were undertaken to bolster his own self-image as a 'master of the universe' . . . the staccato writing style holds you in the centre of the action" - Frank Kane, Sunday Times.
"The inside information, particularly about the rescue attempt, is predictably strong, and the account reads like a financial thriller . . . The authors paint a picture of human frailty on a huge canvas." - Stephen Pollard in The Times.
"Lays serious claim to the tag 'definitive', and it reveals for the first time that Leeson's frauds were undertaken to bolster his own self-image as a 'master of the universe' . . . the staccato writing style holds you in the centre of the action" - Frank Kane, Sunday Times.
"The inside information, particularly about the rescue attempt, is predictably strong, and the account reads like a financial thriller . . . The authors paint a picture of human frailty on a huge canvas." - Stephen Pollard in The Times.
From the Inside Flap
How was Nick Leeson allowed to bring down Barings? How could the City's oldest merchant bank be destroyed, apparently almost overnight, by the reckless gambles of a single trader?
Leeson has given his own account, but All That Glitters tells for the first time the full enthralling story. It lays bare the bizarre and dazzling world of modern financial markets, where national boundaries have been broken by traders who gamble millions of pounds daily, and the ambition, greed and carelessness of those who are meant to control and benefit from the trade.
This book explains how Leeson was drawn into creating fictitious profits in a misguided attempt to impress those around him, and how an entire organization fooled itself into believing that he had discovered the secret of making money at will, in a way that none of its rivals could emulate. The narrative follows Barings from its foundations as a merchant bank in the eighteenth century through its rapid growth in the 1980s, to the moment of hubris when it appeared to have recaptured for the City of London a place as a leading force in international finance.
The authors conducted hundreds of interviews with almost everyone who was intimately involved. They had exclusive access to unpublished letters and records and to extraordinarily gripping telephone transcripts from the final deays, making All That Glitters the definitive, most lucid and compelling account of how a British bank allowed a twenty-seven-year-old to fool them into thinking that he was the most sophisticated and daring trader of them all - until he brought it tumbling around their ears.
As compelling as the best thriller, All That Glitters is a magnificent work of investigation and reconstruction, taking us behind headlines which seemed as exotic as myth or fairy-tale to show how a venerable British institution was brought to grief.
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Breathless and yet improbably tiresome,
By Swami B "Swami B" (Harlem, NY USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: All that Glitters: the Fall of Barings (Hardcover)
This account of a rogue trader whose derivatives positions led to the fall of a now-forgotten British bank is equally destined for the dustbin. In fact, I pulled it from a bargain rack of books, whose seller took such pity on me that she gave me the copy for free, pleading that I should at least save her the trouble of grinding it back into wood pulp. Author Nicholas Denton is so pedestrian in his expectations of the reader, erring on the side of crassness instead of true human insight.
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