How could one trader bring down the banking empire that had funded the Napoleonic Wars? This is the story of Nick Leeson, the young gambler who found himself sucked into a terrifying spiral of loss. Disingenuous but nevertheless compelling, this is a portrait of Leeson -- the working-class boy who lived high, at least for a while, in an upper-class world -- and of Barings, banker to the English peerage, but also of the organized chaos that is the Singaporean money market.