The story they most wanted it to be was clearly compelling.
Editors knew that something big and important and potentially
interesting had happened when young Nicholas Leeson broke the bank
at Barings, by speculating on futures based on the Nikkei stock
average. They just didn’t know how to sell it without getting bogged
down in explanations of boring technicalities like “derivatives,”
which even “60 Minutes” couldn’t make sense of. But the story they
wanted out of it made up for all that. It was
a story about class. A plasterer’s
son from Watford had single-handedly ruined the oldest and most
blue-blooded financial institution in the English-speaking world.

Of course it turned out to be too good to be true. The story broke over
the weekend of February 25–26, so the Sunday papers and newsmagazines had
a whole week to write
it up as a class story. The “barrow boy,”
the “oik” from the wrong side of the tracks with two A-levels (in the
American press
this was roughly translated as “high-school graduate,”
though it’s probably more like a year or two of college), had taken it
on the lam but then turned up in Frankfurt, while his aristocratic
employers presumably had their toffee noses so far in the air that
they couldn’t even see what he had been doing. Everyone knows that
aristocrats are lazy
and out of touch and absurdly trusting.
And
everybody knows that the barrow boys and oiks are cheeky,
irreverent risk-takers who are likely