As we know well, capitalism can be a perilous place.

The environmental group Greenpeace announced Monday that it had lost $5.2 million due, essentially, to a rogue trader.

They had a guy in their finance division who was working currency trades as a way to hedge against other investment fluctuations.

Two things happened:

One, he traded way more money than he was authorized to trade.

And two, he bet the Euro woud fall last year. It didn’t.

$5 million is a boatful of money. The group’s annual revenues, however, are somewhere near $400 million.