Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, Rbs and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy Hardcover – September 12, 2013

Great copy, as described. Arrived quickly!

Good book highlighting the greed for power and money and fame. Goodwin comes across as the sociopath he really is. God save us from the likes of him and his cohorts. These people hadn't really got a clue but it took disaster and the loss of millions and billions for the poor suckers (like me) to find out.

A brilliant insight into Fred Goodwin, and the demise ofThe Royal Bank of Scotland.A must read for all Brits, and gives a great insight into the nonsense & the greed of the GFC era!Once you start you can't put it down, highly recommended!Fred was obviously a flawed genius, who through his actions, became public enemy number one inScotland.Enjoy the journey, I did!

Very good summary of where the banking world - and RBS - lost direction and an understanding of their role in overall society.Well written and moves at speed through the history and the endgame!

A brilliantly researched profile of the unravelling of a disaster. It was objective and readers and others (politicians and regulators) should consider if there could be a repeat of this magnitude in other businesses. Aggressive growth eventually has to come at a cost. Look out Google, Facebook, Apple etc.

If you are a current or former RBS customer or employee angry at the way the scandal affected you, or a UK taxpayer angry at the scale of the bailout required, you will be greatly informed by the book. On the other hand, if you are looking for deep insight into the global financial crisis, you will be served poorly. First: the praise. The book contains a readable and credible account of what happened within RBS. It makes a good case that, whilst Goodwin committed many egregious errors, the blame for the fiasco does not lie with him alone. Mathewson, Cameron and McKillop within RBS and UK politicians and regulators have to share a fair bit of the blame. On the downside though (i) the account is extraordinarily parochial - it is essentially confined to RBS. The rest of the UK banking system does not feature very much and the global system features hardly at all. (ii) the author is out his depth in financial matters. CDOs are presented as toxic instruments, which may be fair enough, but he clearly does not understand them well enough to explain the toxicity. (iii) He is similarly out of his depth in the much easier concept of a rights issue. If a company offers its shareholders new shares at a price of 200p when the shares are currently trading at 363p, this is not a bargain for the shareholders. It is a signal that the company is in such a desperate situation that the management doubt that they could sell the shares at any higher price. (iv) The author lays great stress on the fact that Goodwin was an accountant rather than a banker, but one of the (many) catastrophic errors that he describes in the ABN Amro acquisition was an error for which a trainee accountant would be instantly fired. The acquisition was of a long-term asset, yet it was funded by short-term debt, exposing RBS to the risk (which eventually became fact) that they would not be able to refinance when the short-term debt matured. Given his limited qualifications, the author has done a fair job, but a better qualified author would have been preferable.

The book is well written and contains information that was not available in the media. I now have a much better understanding of why the British economy failed and what the UK government did (and did not do) to address the crisis.

The book provides a thorough and well researched account of the origins of the recent economic disaster in Great Britain. The author has a good style and makes a persuasive case.

Good read...This book gives a perspective on RBS, along with its history.A bit more detailed narrative could have been on the years approaching sub-prime & the story around it.

This is a thrilling tale of financial collapse and a must read for fans of books about company wrong doings during the GFC or who enjoy books about company falls like Enron. This book is a nice blend of business failings combined with personal tales of company culture and the people involved. For those without business knowledge it is still an easy read and even if you don't get every detail of the business dealings the gist of it is clear - hubris and greed. An enjoyable book.

Iain Martin's account and analysis of the rise and fall of The Royal Bank of Scotland, and included in the hubris, Fred (The Shred) Goodwin, "Making It Happen", leaves no doubt that the underlying all-pervasive problem was allowing and encouraging an accountant, the said Fred Goodwin to be in executive control of a trade viz banking that as a professional accountant he had little or no grounding, experience or aptitude in.Whist a good finance man and also a first class project manager as he exhibited with the integration of The NatWest Group into RBS, he alas was woefully inadequate to be a leading banker in charge of a large banking group, and he did not take the final few rungs up the ladder to move from 'dotting i's and crossing t's' to become a fully fledged canny Scottish Banker. He was far more at home burying himself in the minutiae of relatively trivial nit-picking such as office tidiness, colour of company cars, office design etc than the more vital banking fundamentals such as prudent lending policies, proper matched funding of its liabilities, and control of the investment banking, and other activities. RBS borrowed far too much, and lent the money very unwisely, and blundered headlong into the highly 'toxic' Collateralized Debt Obligation casino arena.The author does, however, have a degree of sympathy for Fred Goodwin and asks 'why should he have all the blames, as a lightening rod for everybody else?'. There were plenty of opportunities to stop him, and yet hardly anyone at RBS really tried. Why? Money had quite a lot to do with it, with many staff claiming to be too scared of him to give him bad news or stand up to him, where in reality their reluctance to say anything related to the fact that they were trousering millions of pounds in salary, bonuses and share incentives.This is an excellent, well written, informative and importantly a very readable book that manages admirably to give good perspective and balance to the circumstances leading up to the banks's insolvency and bailout by the British taxpayer. Yet again the weaknesses and gaping flaws in the Regulatory system and it's so-called 'responsible executives', are brought to the fore, with being named and shamed, high up on the list being the then Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King.Presumably because of legal restrictions, scant mention is made of Mr Goodwin's affair with a high ranking RBS female executive, which occurred over the period when RBS was coming under severe pressure and needed firm, constant and concentrated management from it's CEO, and may well have been an unwarranted and catastrophic diversion at that time. The fact that a simple 'google' will readily name the woman involved and lead to a long video featuring her, illustrates the uselessness of the so-called super injunctions that the affluent resort to in the belief that their adulterous liaisons will be kept under wraps or should I say duvets!

日本語版と合わせて、見比べながら読みました。臨場感あっておもしろかったです。

I found this book utterly compelling. Thoroughly researched and well-written, it sets out the background to the world-shattering events leading to the failure of one of the world's largest financial institutions. Reading at times like a thriller crossed with a Greek tragedy, the pressure builds in an almost unbearable tension until the climax which is all the more poignant as we actually lived through it only very recently. My only quibble and the reason why I haven't given this book five stars is that the first few chapters are written in the 'historic present' tense, i.e. it's history and we all know it's in the past but it's written in the present tense so as to make it seem more intense. This is really irritating and the story of the catastrophic collapse of RBS does not require this silly device.