How One Man Controlled 93% of the World's Copper

In November 1995, one man controlled 93% of all the copper in the London Metal Exchange's warehouses. He was not a billionaire or a hedge fund genius. He was Yasuo Hamanaka, a 45-year-old Japanese salaryman in a grey flannel suit, and he had just built the largest unauthorized trading position in financial history. This is the story of how Hamanaka hid a $2.6 billion hole inside Sumitomo Corporation, one of Japan's most respected companies, for eleven years. We reconstruct the machine piece by piece: the LME forwards, the warehouse warrants, the phantom Zambian copper deals, and the short squeeze that let one desk dictate the price of copper for the entire planet. Then came the fall: the fax asking a broker to fake $500 million in trades, the regulators who looked away, and the accounting reconciliation in April 1996 that ended it all. And the question that still divides experts today: was Hamanaka a rogue trader, or was he following company orders? CHAPTERS: 0:00 The Man Who Cornered the Global Copper Market 2:08 The Oldest Trap in the Financial World 4:55 Deconstructing the Mechanics of the Machine 8:42 A Parade of Red Flags Ignored 11:57 Rogue Trader or Company Soldier? What is your verdict: rogue trader or company soldier? Drop it in the comments and tell me which fact changed your mind. I read every one. Subscribe for a new case file every week. Next up: Oscar Hartzell, the Iowan who sold shares in a fortune that never existed and kept the lie alive for twenty years. #TrueCrime #Documentary #Fraud More from the Archive — Full case-file playlist:    • Case Files  . New case file every week — subscribe so you don't miss the next one.