Total Risk

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For more than two centuries, Baring Brothers dominated the global financial markets. It underwrote the Louisiana Purchase, funded the Napoleonic Wars, and rescued many a British firm during the Great Depression. It was Her Majesty's indestructible frigate, ever guarding known waters while charting new ones. In 1992 Barings sent a young would-be trader named Nick Leeson to run its newly formed derivatives unit. By 1995 the twenty-eight-year-old had sunk the 250-year-old ship. Total Risk is a tale close to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, in which one man runs amok when left to his own devices. Rawnsley, an accomplished journalist and novelist, plunges fearlessly into the middle of the crisis, with the sequence of scandalous events beginning on February 23, 1995, as rumors of Barings' financial distress rock the international markets.