Boarding the plane for South-East Asia, I felt like Chicken Little, waiting for the sky to fall. The markets were re-opening after the weekend when the world first heard the name of Nicholas Leeson, the man who broke the bank in Singapore. It's hard to remember how that dawn felt - now that we have reassured ourselves at the building society, peeped with relief beneath the mattress, patted the nest-egg - but the mood then was that the bottom had fallen out of money. It was feared that even the mighty yen was in turnaround, so heaven help the poor old pound. Sydney had been up for a couple of hours, and one trader on the cobber bourse was reported as saying that 'sterling just walked off a cliff.' In the dealing rooms, they call this kind of talk 'sentiment'. It seemed as though the safest place to be was high above the tumbling sky, above the collateral damage - after the fashion of American Presidents, who were to take the atomic valise onto Airforce One as hand luggage in the event of Armageddon.

LRB 23 March 1995 | PDF Download