Ian Fraser’s Shredded: Inside RBS, The Bank That Broke Britain was named as a Book of the Year by the Financial Times, Bloomberg, The Week and Huffington Post and one of best books of the decade by the Financial Times.
Shredded has also been described as the “definitive account” of Royal Bank of Scotland’s collapse, one of the five best books on the global financial crisis, and “a model of the journalist’s craft”.
Financial Times chief economics commentator Martin Wolf named it as one of his best books of the year and it was long-listed for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year.
A fully revised and updated paperback edition published by Birlinn in May 2019 is available in Kindle and paperback. This includes updates throughout, as well as four new chapters detailing recent developments at the bank, which was subsequently renamed NatWest.
The book has also been named as one of the ten best books ever written about bankers by The Guardian and one of the ten best books about financial crime.
“A gripping account… Read it and weep”—Martin Wolf, Financial Times
“Of two recent books about the implosion of RBS, Ian Fraser’s Shredded is the darker, deeper and more satisfying version”—Andrew Hill, Financial Times
“Magnificent… one of the best investigative books of the past decade”—Eamonn O’Neill, BBC Radio Scotland
“The best single company book I have read. Better written and better sourced than Iain Martin’s Making it Happen, Shredded achieves a much better understanding of what went wrong”—Simon Samuels, former managing director, Barclays
“Zola-esque in its broad and unsparing study of corporate hubris”—Bill Jamieson, The Scotsman
“A gripping story that every British taxpayer should read”—Joel Benjamin, Fabian Review
“Magisterial”—Colin Donald, The Herald
“Impeccably researched and hard to put down at any point”—Philip Augar, Financial Times
“A no-holds-barred account of a seismic implosion by a writer with a forensic understanding of his subject”—Tom Mooney, The Echo
“Explosive”—Tom Harper, Independent on Sunday
“Illuminating and often humorous… simply a masterpiece”—Prof Klaus Peter Müller, Scottish Studies
“Fraser understands and can sympathise with human beings caught up in the events that overwhelm them…. An extremely clear-sighted book”—Michael Fry, Scottish Review of Books
“Not just the definitive book on the collapse of RBS but one of the best five books on the great financial collapse which changed 21st century history”—Russell Napier, market historian & investment strategist
“A magnum opus of research and perspective”—Douglas Mill, The Firm Magazine
“This book should be posted through the letterbox of every taxpayer in Britain”—David Mellor, former chief secretary to the Treasury, LBC
“Shredded should be required reading for every civil servant at HM Treasury, every apparatchik in the FCA, and every politician whose brief engages with the City”—Rowan Bosworth-Davies
Synopsis
Based on one-to-one interviews with 120 current and former employees of RBS and related companies, Shredded explores how, under Fred Goodwin, RBS became a rogue institution.
The bank’s collapse was largely the consequence of its pursuit of scale for its own sake. This was epitomised by reckless lending to frothy sectors including commercial property and leveraged buyouts, naive faith in subprime derivatives and the credit rating agencies which evaluated them, and the unhinged October 2007 takeover of Dutch bank ABN Amro.
Shredded outlines how, by terrorising subordinates, ingratiating himself to his superiors, gaming financial regulations and misleading politicians, Goodwin created a poisonous cocktail that ensured the bank was liable to blow up at any time.
But the book makes clear it wasn’t all Goodwin’s fault. Institutional investors and analysts in the City of London gave Goodwin carte blanche to do as he chose and green-lighted his most catastrophic moves, largely because they were impressed by his supposed skills as an integrator of banks that were merging. When it came to ensuring the bank was responsibly managed, RBS’s chairmen and non-executive directors turned out to be largely useless. Its auditors, Deloitte, a firm where Goodwin previously worked as a partner, were reluctant to challenge deceptive accounting.
Partly due to their faith in the competence and integrity of RBS’s management, politicians such as Gordon Brown cheered it on as it swelled its balance sheet with toxic assets. Regulators and central bankers were asleep at the wheel.
But Shredded isn’t just about the catastrophic failures of one bank and those who were supposed to oversee it. It is also about what went wrong with the wider banking and financial system from the 1980s onwards.
The book also charts over a decade of attempts by successive UK governments, and RBS managements, to resuscitate the bank and restore it to health in the wake of its October 2008 near collapse, and the collateral damage these caused. It was a task which former RBS chief executive Stephen Hester described as “defusing the biggest balance-sheet time bomb in history”.
Sunday Herald article: Ian Fraser on 13 things he discovered ‘on the trail of Fred the Shred‘—published 8th June 2014.
Shredded: Inside RBS, The Bank That Broke Britain can be ordered from Amazon.co.uk, Birlinn, Waterstones, Bookshop.org, Hive and other websites. It can also be purchased in most leading independent bookshops.