Template:Roll of honour
Scandal | Date | Where | Loss | Reason | Firings | Jail-Time? |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Post Office Horizon IT scandal | UK | Unjustified prosecution and conviction of hundreds of subpostmasters across the UK | Unaccountability, groupthink, astonishing collective amnesia, widespread incompetence, stupidity. | Conviction, imprisonment, suicide and bankruptcy of hundreds of perfectly innocent and quite nice people. | Loss of public honours (CBE). No firings yet: many candidates for defenestration jumped before they could be fired. | Excoriating public humiliation in front of public enquiry. Increasingly likely some criminal prosecutions may follow. |
Credit Suisse | Switzerland | Gradual decline into entropy with a 92% decline in share price since 2015. | Hubris, widespread incompetence, stupidity, spying, uselessness. | Billions and billions over a series of avoidable cockups. | Like the old man in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “I’m not dead. I think I’m going for a walk. I feel happy.” Market (to SNB): “Isn’t there anything you can do?” | It is not, yet, a crime to make a series of howling cockups[1] over a credulity-defying period any more than it is a crime to not read an AT1 prospectus. Reputations damaged for ever, but alas no porridge, however richly deserved it may seem. |
Silicon Valley Bank memeplex | 2023 | US | $80bn or more | Dopey bank management, regulator asleep at switch, Peter Thiel panicking | Bank insolvent. Bondholders and shareholders wiped out. Other banks levied. Triggered other moral panics such as First National, Signature bank and others (poor old lucky Credit Suisse) | None yet. Lots of arguments about the presence or absence of moral hazard. Moral panic more like. |
Frank | 2023 | US | $175m | Fraud, unfeasible gullibility | Javice got fired. Surely more to come | Not yet clear |
FTX/Sam Bankman-Fried | 2022 | US, Bahamas | $32bn (so far) so some claims that everything has now been recovered and returned to its rightful owner | Hubris, stupidity, fraud | Fired: Gary Wang, Caroline Ellison, SBF. Bankruptcies: Alameda, Genesis, Blockfi. Suspensions of trading: Gemini Reported Losses: Crypto.com, Tiger Global Management, the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, SoftBank Group, BlackRock, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Temasek, and Sequoia Capital reported losses of $1bn |
Charged with wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, money laundering, conspiracy to defraud the U.S., violation of campaign finance laws. |
Barclays MTN Programme Limit | 2022 | US | £1.3bn | Internal Operations | None reported but you have to fear for those poor folk in ops. I beg your pardon? What poor folk in ops? Oh, Right. | No-one goes to jail for forgetting to monitor a programme limit. |
LME Nickel short squeeze | 2022 | London | “Billions” | LME | None reported ... yet | No |
Evergrande | 2021 | China | $300bn | Who knows? | No | |
Archegos | 2021 | US | $10bn+ | UMR Internal operations |
100+ across brokers plus several senior executives and one CEO | Eyes peeled, Mr Huang |
Greensill | 2021 | UK | $4.6bn | |||
Melvin Capital Management LP | 2021 | US | $7bn | Hubris detector failed | Everyone! The fund shut down shortlay after | Talk of regulators, outrageously, going after the outsider traders, but nothing as yet. |
Citigroup v Brigade | 2021 | US | $500m | Outsourcing, Operations, IT | Not reported but wouldn’t fancy being head of the team in Bangalore | No |
Nikola | 2020 | US | About 80% share drop | CEO misrep | Must have been plenty | CEO indicted on charges of securities fraud |
Wirecard | 2020 | Germany | $4bn | CEO misrep | All of them | Three charged with fraud including CEO |
WeWork | 2019 | US | $11bn over three years | CEO yogababble | Nothing to see here folks! Got a new venture to start up | Jail? Dude hasn’t even been kicked off Marc Andreesen’s Xmas Card list. |
Carillion | 2018 | UK | £7bn | Auditors | 3,000 jobs | No but litigation a-plenty |
Patisserie Valerie | 2018 | UK | ||||
Abraaj | 2017 | Saudi | ||||
Fyre festival | 2017 | US | ||||
Mozambique tuna bonds | 2012-2016 | Mozambique, Russia and Switzerland | £1.5-2bn Credit Suisse fined £350m and required to forgive its loans ouch | Fraud, corruption, money laundering | Plenty, including three Credit Suisse bankers and the minister in Mozambique | Three Credit Suisse bankers done on money laundering charges |
1MDB | 2016 | Malaysia, but tentacles stretching all over the world: USA, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Switzerland, China | Somewhere between $4.5bn and $8bn | Colossal fraud, corruption, money laundering and hip-hop | Hell yeah. Prime Ministers, Goldman Sachs Partners, and one dude — Jho Low — on the lam in rural china | You betcha: Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Luxembourg, Seychelles, Singapore, Switzerland, UAE, UK and US are all actively pursuing action. The two Goldman partners pled or were found guilty; one sentenced to 10 years, one awaiting sentencing. Malaysian PM and wife convicted and sentenced to 10+ years with money laundering. If anyone catches Jho Low he’s for the high jump too. |
Mossack Fonseca | 2016 | Panama | ||||
Theranos | 2016 | US | ||||
Wells Fargo accounts fraud | 2016 | US | ||||
Volkswagen emissions | 2015 | Germany and US | ||||
Autonomy | 2012 | UK and US | ||||
Olympus | 2012 | |||||
LIBOR | 2012 | UK | ||||
London Whale | 2012 | UK | ||||
Kweku Abodoli | 2011 | UK | ||||
Jérôme Kerviel | 2008 | UK | ||||
Bernie Madoff | 2008 | US | ||||
Amaranth | 2007 | US | ||||
Tyco | 2002 | US | ||||
Parmalat | 2003 | Italy | ||||
Freddie Mac | 2003 | US | ||||
Global Crossing | 2002 | US | ||||
WorldCom | 2002 | US | ||||
Enron | 2001 | US | ||||
LTCM | 1998 | US | $3.6 bn bailout orchestrated by the Fed | Black-Scholes option pricing model attacked them from nowhere | Everyone out of a job, Master of the Universe-sized reputations (John Meriwether, Myron Scholes, Robert C. Merton) cut to ribbons | No, though fourteen bank CEOs were locked in a room by the Federal Reserve for a weekend so that is something. |
Yasuo Hamanaka | 1996 | UK | ||||
Savings and Loan | 1995 | US | ||||
Nick Leeson | 1992 | UK Singapore |
- ↑ except where the individual cockups were themselves criminal of course