On 28 February 1995, the Bank of England announced that Barings Bank had suffered losses in excess of £265 million and that each further one point fall in the Nikkei index resulted in a further £70 million loss!What happened to Britain's sixth largest investment bank to suffer such a setback?The Barings bankruptcy rested on one man, its star trader in Singapore, Nick Leeson, who speculated on the rise of the Japanese Nikkei index. He could not have foreseen the 17 January 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan's second largest port. From that moment on, the Japanese index fell. It only reached its J...

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