By the late 1880s the City was no longer seen as a place where swindlers could operate without redress, where violent fluctuations in the stock market could ruin investors overnight, or where sudden banking collapses could wipe out a person's entire savings. Though the City remained a place viewed with suspicion by many because of its connection with speculation and the world of money dealing, it did appear to have assumed an air of respectability and reliability among the population at large. However, that reputation was to be severely tested in the early 1890s in a series of financial and banking collapses at home and abroad. The most notable event that originated domestically was the collapse of the Liberator Building Society. This was a bank that had expanded rapidly through the strategy of continuously revaluing its portfolio of mortgaged property so as to justify ever more ambitious lending, and by paying generous rates of interest to small savers. Eventually the whole edifice collapsed in 1892 exposing massive fraud undertaken by its chairman, Jabez Balfour, who then fled abroad so as to escape prosecution. Important as the case of the Liberator Building Society was, in terms of the adverse publicity it created for the City, much more significant were events that took place abroad, such was the global reach of the City of London and the worldwide interests of British investors. Numbered among the most spectacular of these was the Baring Crisis of 1890. This crisis centred on the inability of borrowers in Argentina to service their debts, after a period of rapid expansion financed by selling securities in London to British investors through Barings, one of the City's largest and oldest merchant banks. Not only was Barings responsible for paying interest on these securities, as agent for the borrowers in Argentina, but it also had substantial holdings on its own account. The temporary suspension of interest payments on Argentinian debt and the near collapse of Barings bank helped to undermine confidence in all Latin American securities.