LOOSE CHANGE: How to Rob a Central Bank.

As brazen heists go, it was a quiet one. Over a single weekend in February, hackers managed to extract tens of millions of dollars from Bangladesh’s central bank before anyone noticed. Now the bank is in turmoil, its governor has resigned and much of the cash is missing. It’s one of the biggest holdups in history — and other central banks should be on notice.

The scheme started when intruders inserted malware into Bangladesh Bank’s system in January. With information evidently gleaned from the attack, they were able to divert funds from the bank’s account at the New York Fed using the SWIFT messaging system. Officials only wised up when the thieves tried to move an additional $850 million to suspect accounts, and a routing bank noticed a comical spelling error in one request. By then, some $81 million was long gone.

That’s nothing. Our own central bank has taken most of a trillion dollars from savers since the Great Recession.