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The Bank That Lived a Little
- Barclays in the Age of the Very Free Market
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 15 hrs and 32 mins
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The Bank That Lived a Little
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Summary
Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Bank That Lived a Little by Phillip Augar, read by Jonathan Keeble.
Based on unparalleled access to those involved, and told with compelling pace and drama, The Bank That Lived a Little is the story of one of the most familiar names on the British high street since Big Bang in 1986. Philip Augar describes in detail three decades of boardroom intrigue driven by ruthless ambition, grandiose dreams and a desire for wealth. It is a tale of a struggle for long-term supremacy between rival strategies and their adherents - one camp desperate for Barclays to join the top table of global banks, the other preferring a smaller domestic role more in keeping with the bank's sober Quaker origins. This strategic disagreement continues to divide opinion within Barclays, the city and beyond.
This is an extraordinary corporate thriller, an inside chronicle of personal feuds, but much more besides: Augar shows that Barclays' experiences are a paradigm for Britain's social and economic life over 30 years, which saw the city move from the edge of the economy to its very centre. These decades created unprecedented prosperity for a tiny number and made the reputations of governments and individuals but then left many of them in tatters. The leveraged society, the winner-takes-all mentality and our present era of austerity can all be traced to the influence of banks such as Barclays. Augar's book tells this roller-coaster story from the perspective of many of its participants - and also of those affected by the grip they came to have on Britain.
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What listeners say about The Bank That Lived a Little
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Fred
- 19-09-20
Reasonably interesting
Starts very slowly, and never really gets into enough detail to be truly insightful or captivating. Still, it's an interesting read.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- alistair
- 16-01-19
A must listen.
Knowing very little about banking this book was very insightful. The quickest I’ve ever listened to a book.couldn’t stop listening.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- RuskinSteel
- 27-01-19
Barclays Banksters
This is a good read on the history of Barclays and what went wrong in relation to board oversight and the uncontrolled greed of the senior management and traders. It sets the scene of the banks heritage and does a nice job of bringing back the memories of the bank bailouts and is timely given the court cases currently underway. However, the more recent history doesn't leave great comfort that the lessons have been learnt.
The author tackles some of the mis-selling cases and the damage done to the Barclays brand, but doesn't really answer the question of why more of the individuals involved are not under criminal investigation or been made to return their excessive remuneration packages. Whilst this has been covered in more general banking world, it would have been good to see this from the point of view of the characters at Barclays, who you get to know well throughout the book.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Alex Smith
- 31-12-18
The Bank that lived too much or too long ?
A detailed, well sourced, and at times atmospheric story of the UK’s most newsworthy bank in recent times. Dryly written, it manages to balance the multiple players and perspectives without bias or judgement, allowing the reader to completely decide where responsibility lay. A few things shine through: 1) the emphasis on the spellbound board and non-execs - whose understandably flawed and wishful thinking sustained a bloated investment bank which in hindsight only served its senior massively overpaid (deluded) management. 2) the archaic and sub optimal institutional structures across various Regulator’s whom were unable to keep up with and often fail to understand (until far too late) the excesses of the Bank’s activity - and then mis-prescribe the “cure”. Finally, the sense of history repeating itself as Barclay’s current 0.5x book valuation for a transatlantic full service bank struggles to win over shareholders, again! A big round trip up to 700p, and now at 150p really says it all, with the standalone Investment bank valuation likely negative ...hence more chapters to come!
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- vj
- 19-01-19
Good story but lacked insight
While I enjoyed the book, it was not as insightful as I wished. Alot of the book is dedicated to the turbulent times of the Great Financial Crisis and it's aftermath, I feel anyone who followed the news during this time will learn little new.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Catharine F.
- 18-02-24
Mmmm. Needed more explanations for the lay reader
I am 70, have no advanced economic knowledge but lived throught the crisis of 2008/09 paying great attention to events and needed to understand more about how and why it all happened. My conclusion is that without any detailed explanations provided in the book for the lay reader of how things operate in the financial world, I am left thinking it was simply all driven by a constant series of greedy, evasive, self-interested, egotistic and corrupt men who found the perfect environment in which to operate. So much negotiating went on outside the boardroom on yachts, in villas, in Belgravia, the South of France or Manhattan that it became a story of a parallel world of privilege and phenomenal wealth operating at the expense of people like me. The book was far too gentle and dry about the power wielded by a bank such as this to be a satisfying read..
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