Discussions have been overly one-sided - shareholders / investors (mainly institutional) demand greater return over a short period of time, and constantly compare that to how well other organisations have performed. Banks which did not perform as well as their (in hindsight, excessive-risk taking) peers were punished and constantly benchmarked against their peers, some of which have collapsed spectacularly. Do shareholders really, genuinely believe that they are entitled to 20% compounded annual growth in their stock values when the cash rate is 5% - ie. 15% more return and not much more risk assumed? It's the relentless pursuit of ever higher returns with blatant disregard of risk by investors that have partly contributed to this. What we are seeing today isn't the doing of a particular group of people (CEO, regulators, politicians, etc), but a concerted global effort by everyone (mainly in the developed nations). At the root of this is, quite simply, greed. Greed, in everyone, from investors in real estate (with the illusion of ever-growing asset value, some even resort to explain why the prices can keep growing forever, using demographic shift to fit into what they observe) to the inland revenue / tax authorities / politicians (who are more than happy to see ever increasing tax revenues and lavish themselves with absurd amount of perks and remuneration), that has resulted in where we are today. I agree, the likes of Dick Fuld, Fred Goodwin and Chuck Prince, are to be blamed. If you were the investors that believed in excessive growth / return over your investment, and demanded it, you are to be blamed too.
The World's Worst Banker?
With so many candidates, it's difficult to choose.
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In the past couple of years, the entire global lending industry has covered itself in shame. Virtually every banker was suckered by the credit and housing bubble. But who made the sorriest choices? Who forced shareholders and the public to bear the highest financial cost? Who, in short, is the Worst Banker in the World?
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There's no dearth of candidates. Richard Fuld of Lehman Bros. and James Cayne of Bear Stearns presided over the remarkably disruptive failures of their respective firms. But Bear and Lehman weren't banks, properly speaking: They were hedge funds lashed to investment banks. And their demises didn't require much of a public bailout. The failures of AIG, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac necessitated massive bailouts, but they weren't exactly banks, either. Iceland's bankers have effectively brought their entire country to ruin. But since Iceland's population is a mere 300,000, they're off the hook. In an interview Monday, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman nominated the gang that ran Citigroup into the ground. But Citi was so big it took three CEOs—Sandy Weill, Chuck Prince, and Vikram Pandit—to bring it to the brink of disaster.
No, my nominee is someone whose name may not be familiar to American audiences. He's Fred Goodwin, who until October served as CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Goodwin (here's the Wikipedia entry about him) took the helm of RBS in 2000 and proceeded to turn it into an international powerhouse. Known as "Fred the Shred" for his willingness to cut costs—and jobs—he emerged as Britain's leading banker. He was even knighted in 2004 for services to banking. But the bank, which this summer was Britain's largest, is now neither Royal nor Scottish nor much of a bank. RBS's slogan is "Make it happen." A review of the record shows that Goodwin indeed made it happen. He aced every requirement for a hubristic CEO.
Let's review the record.
Carrying off mergers and acquisitions and calling them growth? Yes. After buying British bank Natwest for about 26.4 billion pounds in 2000, Goodwin used RBS's cash and high-flying stock as a currency for more deals. Among the biggest was the $10.3 billion purchase of Charter One Financial, a Cleveland-based bank, in 2004, thus expanding the bank's footprint in the Rust Belt.
Ill-advised, history-making, massive merger precisely at the top? Yep. In November 2007, RBS and its partners, Fortis and Banco Santander, completed their acquisition of Dutch bank ABN Amro. As proud adviser Merrill Lynch noted, the $101 billion deal was "the world's largest bank takeover and one of the most complex M&A transactions ever." And it closed almost precisely when the air started to come out of the global lending bubble.
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