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Book Description
The definitive insider's history of Britain's financial services sector over the last decade, by one of our leading City commentators.
Product Description
In 1997 it seemed that things in the City could only get better. For ten years everything went according to plan. Buoyed by a strong pound and cheered on by an excitable media, the bankers became the heroes of the age. And then in the summer of 2007 everything began to collapse. Barely a year later the City was in tatters.
Greed, guile and excess - this definitive insider's account charts an intoxicated decade and cogently reveals just how, and why, the City got it so badly wrong.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Often the first books to come out on a topical and controversial subject are the worst. Publishers are desperate to cash in on public interest, so they rush out whatever's to hand. And whatever's to hand usually means the ill-considered ramblings (possibly hastily rewritten) of pseudo-experts whose views happen to match the prevailing orthodoxy at the time.
The credit crunch has been no exception. Given that this is almost certainly the most complicated economic collapse of all time, involving financial instruments so complex even their creators have trouble understanding them, why exactly would I want to read the views of, for example, a literary novelist, a Professor of European Thought or various junior traders who have clearly been sacked and decided they needed a quick way of meeting the mortgage payments on the flat? I'm even pretty sceptical of what light can be shed by journalists and academic economists. The former often only know what others tell them happens not what actually happens; the latter know the theory but not always the practice.
So, thank goodness for Philip Augar. Here at last is a genuine insider with both the knowledge and the contacts to offer an intelligent analysis of what went wrong, why and what should be done about it. Augar takes us through the glory days of the City - 1997 to 2007 - area by area, offering detailed accounts of the rise of hedge funds, private equity, asset management companies and the investment banks. Then, in part II, he gives us a blow-by-blow account of what went wrong and why, analysing its effect on each of the sectors independently. And, as you'd expect, the causes are complex and the effects have been mixed. The banks, for example, clearly got hammered and private equity was cut down to size but the hedge funds merely performed averagely - far from being the weapons of financial mass destruction that we expected none of the major players went bust or even required any government support. The asset management industry, meanwhile, managed to ride out the storm with its reputation enhanced.
His answers are equally nuanced. They include a return to the Glass-Steagall separation of investment and retail banking, which the industry has been vigorously trying to avoid, and to a more coherent arrangement of regulatory powers. But he is also keen to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
A warning: this book is dry. Not textbook dry, you understand - it's still as fluent and readable as his other books. But there is a lot of consideration of policy initiatives, business practices and individual corporate stories, and not much of the "greed, guile and excess" of an "intoxicated decade" as promised by the typically ludicrous back cover blurb. Those who know nothing about how the City works may find it hard going. However, if you really want to know what went wrong with global finance and what we should be doing to fix it, there is currently no better place to start.
The credit crunch has been no exception. Given that this is almost certainly the most complicated economic collapse of all time, involving financial instruments so complex even their creators have trouble understanding them, why exactly would I want to read the views of, for example, a literary novelist, a Professor of European Thought or various junior traders who have clearly been sacked and decided they needed a quick way of meeting the mortgage payments on the flat? I'm even pretty sceptical of what light can be shed by journalists and academic economists. The former often only know what others tell them happens not what actually happens; the latter know the theory but not always the practice.
So, thank goodness for Philip Augar. Here at last is a genuine insider with both the knowledge and the contacts to offer an intelligent analysis of what went wrong, why and what should be done about it. Augar takes us through the glory days of the City - 1997 to 2007 - area by area, offering detailed accounts of the rise of hedge funds, private equity, asset management companies and the investment banks. Then, in part II, he gives us a blow-by-blow account of what went wrong and why, analysing its effect on each of the sectors independently. And, as you'd expect, the causes are complex and the effects have been mixed. The banks, for example, clearly got hammered and private equity was cut down to size but the hedge funds merely performed averagely - far from being the weapons of financial mass destruction that we expected none of the major players went bust or even required any government support. The asset management industry, meanwhile, managed to ride out the storm with its reputation enhanced.
His answers are equally nuanced. They include a return to the Glass-Steagall separation of investment and retail banking, which the industry has been vigorously trying to avoid, and to a more coherent arrangement of regulatory powers. But he is also keen to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
A warning: this book is dry. Not textbook dry, you understand - it's still as fluent and readable as his other books. But there is a lot of consideration of policy initiatives, business practices and individual corporate stories, and not much of the "greed, guile and excess" of an "intoxicated decade" as promised by the typically ludicrous back cover blurb. Those who know nothing about how the City works may find it hard going. However, if you really want to know what went wrong with global finance and what we should be doing to fix it, there is currently no better place to start.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A very detailed and comprehensive account of the financial services industry since it was let loose in the 1980s. Not an easy read, and outsiders to the industry need to note down the accronyms from the start so as to be able to keep up. Probably a book to read once to get the broad outline, then to reread in full detail.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Augar explains what went wrong in the global financial crisis from a London based perspective. He does it in a clear and balanced way by showing how the financial system developed over the last ten years. He does not do finger pointing and instead describes how a collection of factors built up to give an illusion of stability and investment growth without risk, that in the end was an illusion. Nobody got it right and nobody got it wrong, and while the failure could have been predicted, the scale of it could probably not have been.
It is quite complex and there are a lot of acronyms CDOs, SIVs etc. and I found myself looking for a glossary of term but it is worth struggling through the terms to understand why we are in the situation we find ourselves now. It might also encourage more people to get involved in making sure it doesn't happen again, as all the evidence points to lessons not being learned.
It is quite complex and there are a lot of acronyms CDOs, SIVs etc. and I found myself looking for a glossary of term but it is worth struggling through the terms to understand why we are in the situation we find ourselves now. It might also encourage more people to get involved in making sure it doesn't happen again, as all the evidence points to lessons not being learned.
Listmania!
![Economics in a time of crisis [in no order]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51EM%2BxozGXL._AA60_.jpg)
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