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 Ba ...