Commercial Overprint Society of Great Britain
Vol. 2 No. 7; January 1, 2005
Barings Bank
by Jeffrey Turnbull
Barings Bank, previously known as Baring Brothers & Co., is the oldest merchant banking company in England, having been founded in 1762.
Sir Francis Baring (1740-1810; pictured at left) founded the "John and Francis Baring Company" in 1762; renaming it "Baring Brothers and Company" in 1806. Sir Francis helped finance the Napoleonic Wars and underwrote marine insurance. He was succeeded by his son Alexander Baring, who was a pioneer in the financing of United States trade. He was made president of the Board of Trade in 1834 in the first administration of Sir Robert Peel and was raised to the peerage in 1835. The family continued to manage the firm and by 1890 its importance to the British government was such that the Bank of England guaranteed their debts to save them from bankruptcy when Argentina defaulted (1890) on bond payments.
Barings Bank collapsed on February 26, 1995, due to the activities of one rogue trader, Nick Leeson, who lost $1.4 billion by gambling on the SIMEX with primarily derivative securities.
That was the second time Barings had faced bankruptcy; the first time—as mentioned previously—being in 1890 when a significant amount of investment was lost in South America following the Argentinean revolution. However, at that time, they had been bailed out by the Bank of England and other London banks. Barings was purchased by the Dutch bank/insurance company ING after its collapse in 1995 (for the nominal sum of £1) and no longer has a separate corporate existence. Its name lives on in Baring Asset Management.
The Barings Bank overprint, B. B. & Co. Ld., was not reported in Bonney and Lane's GB Commercial Overprints—Banking and Insurance catalogue of 1990.
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