(born 1950) is a former chief
copper
Copper is a chemical element; it has symbol Cu (from Latin ) and atomic number 29. It is a soft, malleable, and ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. A freshly exposed surface of pure copper has a pinkish-orang ...
trader at
Sumitomo Corporation
is one of the largest worldwide '' sōgō shōsha'' general trading companies, and is a diversified corporation. The company was incorporated in 1919 and is a member company of the Sumitomo Group.
It is listed on three Japanese stock exchange ...
, one of the largest trading companies in
Japan
Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...
. He was known as "Mr. Copper" because of his aggressive trading style, and as "Mr. Five Percent" because that is how much of the world's yearly supply he controlled.
On June 13, 1996, Sumitomo Corporation reported a loss of US$1.8 billion in unauthorized copper trading by Hamanaka on the
London Metal Exchange
The London Metal Exchange (LME) is a futures and forwards exchange in London, United Kingdom with the world's largest market in standardised forward contracts, futures contracts and options on base metals. The exchange also offers contracts on ...
. His culpability as to whether this responsibility was authorized is in doubt.
In September 1996, Sumitomo disclosed that the company's financial losses were much higher, at $2.6 billion (285 billion
yen
The is the official currency of Japan. It is the third-most traded currency in the foreign exchange market, after the United States dollar and the euro. It is also widely used as a third reserve currency after the US dollar and the euro.
T ...
).
Hamanaka was sentenced to eight years in prison in 1998 and was released in July 2005, one year early.
See also
*
Kweku Adoboli lost $2 billion for UBS
*
Jérôme Kerviel
Jérôme Kerviel (; born 1977) is a French rogue trader who was convicted and imprisoned in the 2008 Société Générale trading loss for position of trust, breach of trust, forgery and unauthorized use of the bank's computers, resulting in los ...
*
Nick Leeson
Nicholas William Leeson (born 25 February 1967) is an English former derivatives trader whose fraudulent, unauthorised and speculative trades resulted in the 1995 collapse of Barings Bank, the United Kingdom's oldest existing merchant bank ...
caused a loss of £827 million for
Barings Bank
Barings Bank was a British merchant bank based in London. It was one of England's oldest merchant banks after Berenberg Bank, Barings' close collaborator and German representative. It was founded in 1762 by Francis Baring, a British-born member ...
, leading to its collapse
*
List of trading losses
*
Sumitomo copper affair
The Sumitomo copper affair refers to a metal trading scandal in 1996 involving Yasuo Hamanaka, the chief copper trader of the Japanese trading house Sumitomo Corporation (Sumitomo). The scandal involves unauthorized trading over a 10-year period b ...
References
External links
"How Copper Came a Cropper: Sumitomo's robber-baron tactics make the case for regulation"by
Paul Krugman
Paul Robin Krugman ( ; born February 28, 1953) is an American New Keynesian economics, New Keynesian economist who is the Distinguished Professor of Economics at the CUNY Graduate Center, Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He ...
, MIT
1950 births
20th-century Japanese businesspeople
Japanese white-collar criminals
Living people
Rogue traders
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