Word: leesons
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Sexy, But Which Sex? An inspiration and patroness to adventurous young directors, especially women, Swinton made her American-film debut as a pan-sexually voracious attorney in Susan Streitfeld's Female Perversions. Lynn Hershman-Leeson cast her as Lord Byron's daughter Ada King, who devised an early computer, in Conceiving Ada, and, in Teknolust, as a geneticist who makes three copies of herself (you must see the trio dance together in kimonos). But it was Sally Potter's Orlando, which Swinton helped raise the money for, that won the actress her sturdiest pre-Hollywood acclaim...
Listen, let me tell you something: I knew Nick Leeson. Oh, OK, not personally. But as a reporter, I covered Leeson, the young trader who single-handedly broke the bank at Barings in 1995. And you know what? This kid Jérôme Kerviel, the 31-year-old who managed to lose $7.2 billion (that's with a B) at Paris investment bank Société Générale in just a few weeks, he's ... he's ... so much like Leeson that it's scary...
...those who don't recall, Leeson was 27 years old, living in Singapore, and trading futures contracts based on the Nikkei stock index and Japanese government bonds when he got into trouble in the mid-'90s. He was anything but one of the investment banking "Masters of the Universe" made famous by Tom Wolfe in the 1980s. He was a relatively ordinary young professional on an obscure trading desk, who bet the wrong way on the Nikkei's direction; then he doubled down, trying to recoup the firm's money, and lost again. At one point in early...
Maybe so, but the basics of grand, bone-jarring deceit cut across cultures - and decades. Like young Nick, Kerviel also devised a way to hide his trades from asleep-at-the-switch "superiors." And like Leeson, he disappeared for a few days, apparently holed up in a Paris apartment, just before the roof fell in. The comparisons are more than cursory. One of the lessons of Leeson (supposedly burned into the brain of trading desks everywhere) was to separate what banks call "the back office," where trades are processed and recorded, from the trading desks. Leeson had run the back...
Please! At least at venerable old Barings no one tried to make such claims after Leeson blew the place up. One of the scariest things about the current global credit meltdown is that we still don't know the depth and breadth of the losses. Indeed, banks don't even know how to value a lot of the paper on their books these days. What we, and they, do know is that ordinary young traders can see their positions go south and are liable to panic and mess up in ways that keep pushing the decimal point over...