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4 reviews for:
The Bank That Lived a Little: Barclays in the Age of the Very Free Market
Philip Augar
4.08 AVERAGE
4 reviews for:
The Bank That Lived a Little: Barclays in the Age of the Very Free Market
Philip Augar
4.08 AVERAGE
The Bank That Lived A Little is the story of a big bank that wanted to be a bigger bank and really sucking at that (though not really any worse than anyone else), and the cultural friction between American and British way of doing things, which Augar diplomatically attempts to remedy by adopting Americanised spellings.
'We're right. What are you going to do about it?'
Do you like finance? No? Good, you don’t have to worry about it here.
The Bank That Lived A Little is very begrudging in explaining how the money markets work, deigning under apparent sufferance to explain what Collateralised Debt Obligation is. Instead it’s about the deals deals deals, the boardroom manoeuvring, and the high life, or at least a sanitised version of it, with ski trips, gentlemen’s clubs, and marquees on the lawns and liveried servants. Augar’s literary tics are vignettes of ostentatious displays of wealth, mixed with remarkable silences about the heroic levels of drug taking in the UK’s professional classes.
Augar’s recounting of conversations are, frankly, a bit shit. In Augar’s retellings, it might be a classic Varley call: quiet, understated and well judged, but the actual transcripts are agonisingly dull:
'I know we like Barclays. We've been in them all the way up from 500 pence when Varley took over. We love Diamond, we do a lot of business with Barclays Capital and they are one of our prime brokers. But I've been running the numbers. Barclays Capital have been using more and more capital to grow profits. The return on every dollar they invest gets lower every year, so they borrow more.'
Painful, colourless stuff.
The narrative is also mostly chronological but leaps round from incident to incident, and more races through them than actually taking the opportunity to educate the reader about, for example, British and European financial relations (try and find an instance of Brexit being mentioned in a book that finishes in 2017!).
Theoretically, there is value in The Bank That Lived A Little. We get Barclays’ version of the failed Lehmann bailout (the American retellings tend to throw Barclays under the bus). The issues of upselling and cross-selling are covered well and it is worth pointing out that inexperienced boards of directors are vulnerable to control by over-powerful chief executives/chairmen:
Broadbent apart, most non-executives still had no idea what Barclays Capital was really doing.
It had all gone too far.
In reality, there is no value in The Bank That Lived A Little.
Augar is coy over who he interviewed, and states that when he writes about what a character thought, it doesn’t necessarily meant they told him that. This is an incredible approach, as in not a credible way to do things. It shows in the biases in the narrative, the pseudonymous Charlie Bycroft becoming a silver tongued charmer as It was very artfully done, or that Bob Diamond:
joined in the banter, stood his round in the pub, but never got stupidly drunk or went on to the girlie bars.
...as though genuflection to your preferred characters is obligatory. It is more than just opinion, such as Augar’s worshipful tones about the Irish Canadian chairman Matt Barrett:
Still in his early fifties, he was unlikely to remain single for long.
…as Augar outright omits at least one material scandal during his tenure. Amanda Staveley becomes a far more substantive character than reality (and court judgement) support. It’s so unbalanced that it makes the entire narrative untrustworthy. I am sure the basic structure of events is correct, but the input and reactions of those involved in them are unreliable. Conflicting recollections of events are rarely presented, it’s all assumed Augar has the correct version and the reader should be wowed by laudatory non sequiturs such as how some Damien Hirst etchings had been bought with typical acumen just before the artist's reputation really took off.
This was not the moment to appear vulnerable.
I think there’s some morality tale in The Bank That Lived A Little about the over-competitive nature of the banking industry leading to widespread rule breaking. But, man, it is a dull and meandering journey in getting there. I found myself incredibly unsympathetic to all those involved – not necessarily over the levels of compensation or lifestyle (I’m not here to hold your hand if you’re mug enough to invest in actively managed financial products that fund their bonuses), but over the constant whinging over perceived unfair treatment or mismanagement:
Speculators cared only whether it landed on red or on black, whereas for them the survival of a three-centuries-old institution with 48 million customers and 156,000 employees was at stake.
Your characters are welcome to go off and lose 99% of a fund’s stock price over some performative white saviourism. What they don’t need is a hagiography about the time the Bank of England told them to bugger off.
'We're right. What are you going to do about it?'
Do you like finance? No? Good, you don’t have to worry about it here.
The Bank That Lived A Little is very begrudging in explaining how the money markets work, deigning under apparent sufferance to explain what Collateralised Debt Obligation is. Instead it’s about the deals deals deals, the boardroom manoeuvring, and the high life, or at least a sanitised version of it, with ski trips, gentlemen’s clubs, and marquees on the lawns and liveried servants. Augar’s literary tics are vignettes of ostentatious displays of wealth, mixed with remarkable silences about the heroic levels of drug taking in the UK’s professional classes.
Augar’s recounting of conversations are, frankly, a bit shit. In Augar’s retellings, it might be a classic Varley call: quiet, understated and well judged, but the actual transcripts are agonisingly dull:
'I know we like Barclays. We've been in them all the way up from 500 pence when Varley took over. We love Diamond, we do a lot of business with Barclays Capital and they are one of our prime brokers. But I've been running the numbers. Barclays Capital have been using more and more capital to grow profits. The return on every dollar they invest gets lower every year, so they borrow more.'
Painful, colourless stuff.
The narrative is also mostly chronological but leaps round from incident to incident, and more races through them than actually taking the opportunity to educate the reader about, for example, British and European financial relations (try and find an instance of Brexit being mentioned in a book that finishes in 2017!).
Theoretically, there is value in The Bank That Lived A Little. We get Barclays’ version of the failed Lehmann bailout (the American retellings tend to throw Barclays under the bus). The issues of upselling and cross-selling are covered well and it is worth pointing out that inexperienced boards of directors are vulnerable to control by over-powerful chief executives/chairmen:
Broadbent apart, most non-executives still had no idea what Barclays Capital was really doing.
It had all gone too far.
In reality, there is no value in The Bank That Lived A Little.
Augar is coy over who he interviewed, and states that when he writes about what a character thought, it doesn’t necessarily meant they told him that. This is an incredible approach, as in not a credible way to do things. It shows in the biases in the narrative, the pseudonymous Charlie Bycroft becoming a silver tongued charmer as It was very artfully done, or that Bob Diamond:
joined in the banter, stood his round in the pub, but never got stupidly drunk or went on to the girlie bars.
...as though genuflection to your preferred characters is obligatory. It is more than just opinion, such as Augar’s worshipful tones about the Irish Canadian chairman Matt Barrett:
Still in his early fifties, he was unlikely to remain single for long.
…as Augar outright omits at least one material scandal during his tenure. Amanda Staveley becomes a far more substantive character than reality (and court judgement) support. It’s so unbalanced that it makes the entire narrative untrustworthy. I am sure the basic structure of events is correct, but the input and reactions of those involved in them are unreliable. Conflicting recollections of events are rarely presented, it’s all assumed Augar has the correct version and the reader should be wowed by laudatory non sequiturs such as how some Damien Hirst etchings had been bought with typical acumen just before the artist's reputation really took off.
This was not the moment to appear vulnerable.
I think there’s some morality tale in The Bank That Lived A Little about the over-competitive nature of the banking industry leading to widespread rule breaking. But, man, it is a dull and meandering journey in getting there. I found myself incredibly unsympathetic to all those involved – not necessarily over the levels of compensation or lifestyle (I’m not here to hold your hand if you’re mug enough to invest in actively managed financial products that fund their bonuses), but over the constant whinging over perceived unfair treatment or mismanagement:
Speculators cared only whether it landed on red or on black, whereas for them the survival of a three-centuries-old institution with 48 million customers and 156,000 employees was at stake.
Your characters are welcome to go off and lose 99% of a fund’s stock price over some performative white saviourism. What they don’t need is a hagiography about the time the Bank of England told them to bugger off.
informative
medium-paced
informative
fast-paced
Easy to read, have a great, well researched insight into the firm during its lifetime.