Word: osaka
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...attacks by terrorists, voters have decided that comedians are best suited to run the government -- or at least two major cities. In elections Sunday, Tokyo voters elected as their governor Yukio Aoshima, who donned a kimono and wig to portray "Nasty Grandma" in a popular 1960s TV show. In Osaka, comic "Knock" Yokoyama won the honor. Though both are longtime members of Paliament's upper house, they were able to capitalize on voter anger with politics-as-usual to beat major party candidates...
That was the poisoned state of affairs on March 19, when the Osaka police broke into one of the cult's offices and freed a student they claimed was being held there against his will. The raid had been a long time in the planning, both in order to assemble evidence and because the Japanese authorities are particularly sensitive to charges that they are persecuting religious groups. Nonetheless, concerns about Aum's possible connection with sarin and other sect-related tensions prompted them to act. In response, the cult's leaders had its lawyers file suit. And the next...
...year in which he supposedly earned huge profits for Barings and had become known unofficially as the Nikkei king on the SIMEX floor. His reputation was based on his ability to spot tiny differences in the value of Nikkei futures on the exchanges of Singapore and Osaka, Japan, and make millions by exploiting the spread, buying where the price was low and immediately selling where it was high. But those 1994 profits now seem almost paltry. In 1995 the losses would increase more than tenfold...
...said he was executing the huge purchase orders at a client's behest-and presumably with the client's funds. Furthermore, to Barings' delight, Leeson was also making a tidy profit by making those trades in conjunction with the bank's separate and official holdings of Nikkei 225s in Osaka and SIMEX."I won't tell you how good," says a Barings employee, "but it was a good business." Little did Barings know that it was responsible for error account No. 88888, which was unhedged and would turn out to be fatal to the company...
...safe bet: the Japanese economy was already rebounding after a 30-month recession. Using the account No. 88888 also had a special advantage, one that Leeson had probably learned about in his old back-office job in London when he made sure cash flowed into the right accounts. Both Osaka and Singapore demand prompt margin payments on contracts-that is, the difference between what the contracts were sold for and their value at the close of each trading session. Since the account was technically Barings' property, it appears that the company automatically made some of the payments...