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The Talon Files
Account 88888: The Number That Broke a 232-Year-Old Bank
Every number in this episode is from the historical record. The fiction is in the name, the marriage, and the five o'clock morning.
The Novella: The Error Account — The Rogue Traders Series, Book 1 Available on Amazon Kindle and in paperback: [link]
The Real Case: The Collapse of Barings Bank, 1995
- Final losses: £827 million
- Barings capital at time of collapse: ~£540 million
- Sale price to ING: £1
- Sentence: 6.5 years (served 4)
Key structural failure: Segregation of duties — the practice of separating trade execution from trade settlement — was not maintained at Barings' Singapore operation. One person controlled both functions. This is the gap the account lived in.
Further reading:
- Rogue Trader by Nick Leeson (memoir, 1996)
- Barings Collapse — Bank of England report, 1995
- The Collapse of Barings by Stephen Fay (1996)
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The Talon Files is the companion podcast to the financial thriller series by K. R. Talon — novellas built on real market scandals, rogue traders, and the numbers institutions tried to hide. Each episode unpacks the true events behind one book: what actually happened, what the fiction changed, and what the market learned — or didn't.
Every story is fiction. Every number is real.