Download or read book Shredded written by Ian Fraser and published by Birlinn. This book was released on 2015-10-14 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the definitive account of the Royal Bank of Scotland scandal. For a few brief months in 2007 and 2009, the Royal Bank of Scotland was the largest bank in the world. Then the Edinburgh-based giant - having rapidly grown its footprint to 55 countries and stretched its assets to £2.4 trillion under its hubristic and delinquent former boss Fred Goodwin - crashed to earth. In Shredded, Ian Fraser explores the series of cataclysmic misjudgments, the toxic internal culture and the 'light touch' regulatory regime that gave rise to RBS/NatWest's near-collapse. He also considers why it became the most expensive bank in the world to bail out and why a culture of impunity was allowed to develop in the banking sector. This new edition brings the story up to date, chronicling the string of scandals that have come to light since taxpayers rescued RBS and concluding with an evaluation of the attempts of the bank's post-crisis chief executives, Stephen Hester and Ross McEwan, to dismantle Goodwin's disastrous legacy and restore the damaged institutions to health. 'A gripping account - RBS was a rogue business, operating in what had become a rogue industry, with the connivance of government. Read it and weep' – Martin Woolf, Financial Times

Download or read book The Royal Bank of Scotland Review written by and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Making It Happen written by Iain Martin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-09-12 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When RBS collapsed and had to be bailed out by the taxpayer in the financial crisis of October 2008 it played a leading role in tipping Britain into its deepest economic downturn in seven decades. The economy shrank, bank lending froze, hundreds of thousands lost their jobs, living standards are still falling and Britons will be paying higher taxes for decades to pay the clean-up bill. How on earth had a small Scottish bank grown so quickly to become a global financial giant that could do such immense damage when it collapsed? At the centre of the story was Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive known as "Fred the Shred" who terrorised some of his staff and beguiled others. Not a banker by training, he nonetheless was given control of RBS and set about trying to make it one of the biggest brands in the world. It was said confidently that computerisation and new banking products had made the world safer. Only they hadn't... Based on more than 80 interviews and with access to diaries and papers kept by those at the heart of the meltdown, this is the definitive account of the RBS disaster, a disaster which still casts such a shadow over our economy. In Making It Happen, senior executives, board members, Treasury insiders and regulators reveal how the bank's mania for expansion led it to take enormous risks its leaders didn't understand. From the birth of the Royal Bank in 18th century Scotland, to the manic expansion under Fred Goodwin in the middle of a mad boom and culminating in the epoch-defining collapse, Making It Happen is the full, extraordinary story.

Download or read book The FSA s Report Into the Failure of RBS written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Treasury Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-10-19 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report identifies issues arising from the FSA's report into the failure of RBS that may merit further legislative or regulatory change. The report also considers the value of the reporting process for understanding the causes of RBS's failure and for ensuring that appropriate lessons have been learnt. The Government should include an explicit requirement for the Prudential Regulation Authority to approve major bank acquisitions and mergers in forthcoming legislation and the Treasury should report on the legislative or other changes it proposes to make to the current regime regulating acquisitions in the banking sector. The Bank of England has still to produce a comprehensive review of the Bank's role in, and response to, the crisis. Any lessons learned will only be available at a very late stage in Parliament's consideration of the Financial Services Bill, when incorporation of them into legislation may be more difficult. The Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards should examine the PRA's approach to banking supervision. The Government should consult on whether additional legislation is required to ensure that directors or other senior executives of failed banks cannot work in other regulated industries in future, or to make the system more certain. The Committee supports attempts to remedy the misalignment of incentives embedded within the financial services framework. The introduction of strict liability would be a major change to the existing legal framework and would require full public debate. The Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards should examine this and other options.

Download or read book The New Few written by Ferdinand Mount and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This was supposed to be the era when democracy came into its own, but instead power and wealth in Britain have slowly been consolidated the hands of a small elite, while the rest of the country struggles financially and switches off politically. We are now ruled by a gang of fat-cats with fingers in every pie who squabble for power among themselves while growing richer. Bored with watching corrupt politicians jockeying for power, ordinary Britons are feeling disconnected from politics and increasingly cynical about the back-scratching relationship between politicians and big business. The New Fewshows us what has led to this point, and asks the critical questions: whyhas Britain become a more unequal society over the past thirty years? Whyhave the banks been bailed out with taxpayers' money, while bankers are still receiving huge bonuses? Why have those responsible not been held accountable for the financial crash? Why has power in Britain become so concentrated in the hands of corrupt politicians who have been exposed cheating their constituents in the expenses scandal? Despite this bleak diagnosis, there are solutions to the rise of the new ruling class in the modern West. The New Few sets out some of the ways in which we can restore our democracy, bringing back real accountability to British business and fairness to our society.

Download or read book Hubris written by Ray Perman and published by Birlinn. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1995 Bank of Scotland celebrated 300 years as Britain's oldest commercial bank. Voted 'most admired bank', respected by competitors, applauded by investors and trusted by customers, it looked forward to the next three hundred. Less than 15 years later it was bust, reviled as part of the spectacular collapse of HBOS, the conglomerate it had joined. One of the high-profile victims of the credit crunch, its spectacular fall caused seismic shock waves throughout the financial world. What went wrong? Ray Perman, who has followed the Bank since the 1970s when he was a Financial Times journalist, uncovered the story from documents and dozens of interviews with people at the top in Bank of Scotland and HBOS - from being the bank of choice for the highrolling Monte Carlo mega-rich to losing GBP10 billion. It is a cautionary tale for our times. In the complex world of modern global finance, the brilliant men who ran the company ignored the simple banking rules that their predecessors learned the hard way three centuries before.

Download or read book The Rise and Fall of the City of Money written by Ray Perman and published by Birlinn Ltd. This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It started and ended with a financial catastrophe. The Darien disaster of 1700 drove Scotland into union with England, but spawned the institutions which transformed Edinburgh into a global financial centre. The crash of 2008 wrecked the city's two largest and oldest banks – and its reputation. In the three intervening centuries, Edinburgh became a hothouse of financial innovation, prudent banking, reliable insurance and smart investing. The face of the city changed too as money transformed it from medieval squalor to Georgian elegance. This is the story, not just of the institutions which were respected worldwide, but of the personalities too, such as the two hard-drinking Presbyterian ministers who founded the first actuarially-based pension fund; Sir Walter Scott, who faced financial ruin, but wrote his way out of it; the men who financed American railways and eastern rubber plantations with Scottish money; and Fred Goodwin, notorious CEO of RBS, who took the bank to be the biggest in the world, but crashed and burned in 2008.

Download or read book The History of the Royal Bank of Scotland 1727 1927 written by Neil Munro and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Sabotage written by Anastasia Nesvetailova and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I don't like the word 'sabotage',"--a former Goldman Sachs trader admitted. "It's just harsh.... Though, frankly, how else do you make money in this business...I mean, real money." The fundamental motive for financial innovation is not to make the system work better, but to avoid regulation and oversight. This is not a bug of the financial system, but a built-in feature. The president of the US is not a tax avoider because he is an especially fraudulent financier; he's a tax avoider because he is a wealthy man in a system premised on such deceit. Finance is an industry of sabotage. This book is a brilliant, intellectual detective story that traces the origins of financial sabotage, starting with the work of a prescient American economist who saw the capacity for banks and businesses to dissemble and profit as early as the 1920s. What was accomplished modestly in the first half of the 20th century became a booming global industry in the 1980s. Financialization took over everything, culminating in instruments so complex and confusing their own creators were being destroyed by them in 2008. With each financial bust, people expect to hear who the culprit was, and cynically know to not expect much punishment to ever reach them. But the innovation of this book is to show that each individual gaming the system isn't a crook---the whole system is sabotage.

Download or read book An Introduction to Credit Derivatives written by Moorad Choudhry and published by Butterworth-Heinemann. This book was released on 2012-12-31 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second edition of An Introduction to Credit Derivatives provides a broad introduction to products and a marketplace that have changed significantly since the financial crisis of 2008. Author Moorad Choudhry gives a practitioner's perspective on credit derivative instruments and the risks they involve in a succinct style without sacrificing technical details and scientific precision. Beginning with foundational discussions of credit risk, credit risk transfer and credit ratings, the book proceeds to examine credit default swaps and related pricing, asset swaps, credit-linked notes, and more. Ample references, appendices and a glossary add considerably to the lasting value of the book for students and professionals in finance. - A post-crisis guide to a powerful bank risk management product, its history and its use - Liberal use of Bloomberg screens and new worked examples increase hands-on practicality - New online set of CDS pricing models and other worksheets multiply the book's uses

Download or read book The Perfect Prey written by Jeroen Smit and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2010-01-07 with total page 651 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 9 October 2007, the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) celebrated its leading role in the biggest deal in banking history, a record 71 billion euros for Dutch bank ABN Amro. Searching for an immediate profit, the victors dismantled ABN Amro - and Holland's number one bank ceased to exist. Shareholders and management enjoyed the spoils and the Netherlands lost the bank that had been at the heart of their economy for 183 years. But the profits were an illusion - they simply weren't there. One year later, RBS had been forced into the largest rights issue in British corporate history, underwritten by the Government. So why was ABN Amro so toxic? On the basis of more than 120 conversations with the most important individuals involved, Jeroen Smit reconstructs the downfall of a Dutch institution - a bank whose rotten core was so disguised by paper profits of billions every year. In little more than a decade, one of Europe's largest, longest established banks went from powerful predator to the perfect prey.

Download or read book Transformative HR written by John W. Boudreau and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-08-24 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proven HR strategies that can have a real impact on organizational success This book demonstrates how some of the world's most admired and prominent organizations are redefining HR leadership by using evidence-based change to inform human capital decisions that optimize efficiency, effectiveness and strategic impact. The authors present the five foundational principles to the new HR decision science: Logic-driven analytics, segmentation, risk leverage, synergy and integration and optimization. Includes practical suggestions and approaches to help executives put the book's principles into action Contains insight based on the experiences of leading global organization such as PNC Bank, CME Group, Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Telekom and Shanda Interactive Entertainment Features in-depth case studies of 6 international companies: Coca-Cola, Khazanah Nasional Berhad, IBM, Ameriprise Financial, Royal Bank of Canada and Royal Bank of Scotland This groundbreaking book reveals a new approach to deliver sustainable change and business results. It is enhanced with success stories from leading companies that engage leadership and involve employees in ways that make a lasting impact on their companies.

Download or read book The Multinational Subsidiary written by N. Hood and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-11-03 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book highlights the evolution of the thinking on the multinational subsidiary over a quarter of a century, from the early concerns about the 'branch plant syndrome' to very current topics relating to the Multinational Enterprise as a differentiated corporate network and its role in innovation and entrepreneurship. It summarises and evaluates the state of the art in research on the multinational subsidiary, with particular reference to managerial and economic development dimensions. The volume presents the articles of Neil Hood (written in conjunction with other leading scholars, particularly Julian Birkinshaw and Stephen Young), along with new contributions. The book will be of major interest to students, researchers and policy makers.

Download or read book Japanese Manufacturing Investment in Europe written by Roger Strange and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 574 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japanese manufacturing investment in the European Community has grown dramatically over the last twenty years. At first, instances of investment were few, concentrated in a small number of industrial sectors. But since the mid-1980's there has been a surge of investment in a much wider range of industries. This volume details the growth of Japanese manufacturing investment in Europe in fourteen industrial sectors. The impact of Japanese competition and direct investment on European industries is considered in the context of the emergence of the three major trading blocs: the United States, Japan and the EC. Roger Strange concludes by making important policy recommendations, and arguing for the need for a new theoretical framework for assessing the political economy of foreign direct investment.

Download or read book The Future of Financial Systems and Services written by Edward P.M. Gardener and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of essays comprises a systematic collection of views from scholars and practitioners on the future of financial systems and services and reflects the fact that the financial industry worldwide is involved in a major restructuring process.

Download or read book The Virgin Banker written by Jayne-Anne Gadhia and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-04-20 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jayne-Anne Gadhia, the straight-talking CEO of Virgin Money, looks back at the events that have influenced, shaped and inspired her to become one of the most powerful women in banking. With anecdotes from her life before becoming a banker, including beating the bullies and experiencing racism as part of a mixed race marriage, through to building a business from scratch, working at RBS under Fred Goodwin just before the financial crash, and steering Virgin Money to become a listed business, breaking boundaries along the way, professionally and personally. Jayne-Anne shines a light on issues surrounding the role of women in banking and the alpha-male dinosaurs that dominate the industry. She draws on the relationships and deals that have shaped her career so far, including her personal experience with mental health issues, which has helped her attitude and approach to both her business and personal life. This is not a conventional biography, nor a ‘how to do it’ business book. It is a candid, fresh and fascinating insight into being a woman in business, the financial crisis and the way in which business can be conducted as a force for good.

Download or read book The Palgrave Companion to LSE Economics written by Robert A. Cord and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-01-18 with total page 949 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The London School of Economics (LSE) has been and continues to be one of the most important global centres for economics. With six chapters on themes in LSE economics and 29 chapters on the lives and work of LSE economists, this volume shows how economics became established at the School, how it produced some of the world’s best-known economists, including Lionel Robbins and Bill Phillips, plus Nobel Prize winners, such as Friedrich Hayek, John Hicks and Christopher Pissarides, and how it remains a global force for the very best in teaching and research in economics. With original contributions from a stellar cast, this volume provides economists – especially those interested in macroeconomics and the history of economic thought – with the first in-depth analysis of LSE economics.