From Leeson to Lehmans: The global events that shaped 20 years of investment

To commemorate Investment Week's 20th Anniversary, Hardeep Tawakley assesses the impact of major events in financial markets since 1995.

From rogue trader Nick Leeson’s fraudulent trading, which ultimately caused the collapse of one of the oldest banking institutions in the world in 1995, to the terrorist attack in New York six years later and numerous natural disasters in America and Japan, few events left markets unscathed over the past 20 years. Notably, the 1997 Asian financial crisis wrecked the economies of several ‘Asian Tigers’, and stock markets around the world sold off significantly. It was a year later in 1998, that Russia’s rouble crisis came to a head and the same thing happened again. These crises were r...