Word: bonds
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Toshide Iguchi, the former Daiwa Bank bond trader at the center of $1.1 billion in losses, stunned a Manhattan courtroom today by accusing at least two senior Daiwa managers of urging him to continue a coverup as recently as a month ago. "This just keeps getting worse and worse," says New York bureau chief John Moody. "The first thing it will probably affect is the Federal Reserve's plan to buy Treasury bonds from the Japanese. We will look awfully naive using taxpayer money to bail out Japanese banks if those banks are playing games with us. It will also...
...Attorney's office in Manhattan. During those 11 years, the office said, the baby-faced Iguchi made an astronomical 30,000 unauthorized transactions while trying to cover up losses that ultimately ballooned to $1.1 billion. His method was simple: whenever he lost money as a government-bond trader, Iguchi allegedly plucked and sold bonds from Daiwa's own accounts or those of its customers, and then forged documents to make the trades look like authorized transactions. He seemingly sought no gain for himself other than to conceal his losses...
...authorities, some Wall Street experts said the delay looked suspicious and improper. "That is not acceptable behavior in our view," says Heinz Binggeli, managing director of Emcor Risk Management, a consulting firm. "You don't let two months pass before you shut down the operation." Says the chief government-bond trader for a large Wall Street firm: "This went on undetected for 11 years? Come on, who's kidding whom? It's a joke...
After briefly selling used cars, Iguchi joined Daiwa in New York City and spent eight years handling back-office paperwork for government-bond trading. He was promoted to trader in 1984 and, because the office was a small one, remained in charge of keeping the books. But things took a wrong turn from the get-go when Iguchi lost an estimated $200,000 trading bonds and allegedly recouped it through his illegal scheme. "We had great expectations for him, and so he felt obliged to keep going instead of coming clean," says Kenji Yasui, a Daiwa deputy president...
Iguchi grew bolder and bolder, reportedly trading as much as $500 million worth of bonds in a single day. But by late 1993, Iguchi was finding it increasingly difficult to dip into Daiwa's bond accounts to make up for losses. That year, Daiwa split up the bond-trading and record-keeping functions in its New York offices. In his letter to bank president Fujita, Iguchi reportedly said the change had made it hard to continue concealing his losses. Yet the very fact that Iguchi kept up the deception for two years more heightened suspicions on Wall Street that someone...