The Art of the Shred

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0:54thanks for listening to a long time in finance with jonathan ford and neil collins

1:03Jonathan: welcome everybody tonight it's very very special night here at the library of mistakes our first live podcast with our friends a long time in finance neil collins jonathan ford tonight And once again, a very special occasion because they are interviewing Ian Fraser, who is a well-kent face around this part of the world and in this library, author of Shred It. And we're about to talk about shredding. Great. Well, thanks very much, Russell. And very nice to see all of you here. Welcome to A Long Time in Finance.

1:40Well, we thought, Neil and I, when we were trying to think what we were going to talk about, we had various ideas of doing things about all sorts of complicated financial stuff. And then we thought, actually, if we're coming to Edinburgh, what we should really talk about is particularly in light of James Graham's play, the story of Royal Bank of Scotland and its captain, Fred Goodwin. So we should start really by talking a bit about the play, which we haven't seen because it hasn't been on in England yet, although I think it is going to come down in future, but you have been to see it. So, Ian, what did you make of it?

2:13Did you learn anything new? I didn't learn anything new, but then I had spent two years of my life researching RBS and ten years following Fred Goodwin's progress while I was financial editor of the Sunday Herald. I mean, I suppose the key idea for me was that Adam Smith should come back from the dead as the ghost of Adam Smith and question what Fred Goodwin was doing at the bank. So I think this was what made it for me, that Brian Cox character, and apparently it was him who actually suggested this concept to James Graham, the playwright, that this should be the ghost of Adam Smith who comes back and says, no, no, no, you've misunderstood what I stand for or what my philosophy or economic ideas were.

2:56Overall, it was well worth going. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I felt they had pillaged my book and taken a lot of different anecdotes and stories out of the book without consulting me or crediting me, but I didn't mind that. Before we turn to the subjects at hand, I think we wanted to sort of try and frame this discussion by answering a couple of questions. One is, was Fred Goodwin the victim of forces beyond his control? Did cheap money, regulatory failings fuel irrational behaviour by bankers everywhere? So he's just one of many. Or were individual character failings and an inward-looking corporate culture the key factors in the RBS collapse?

3:38Now, those are the big questions we want to answer. But maybe we can start by sketching in. And you can start by sketching in for us a bit about Fred, the man himself, his background and all that. So Fred Goodwin was born in Paisley in August 1958. And he lived in Fergus Lee Park, which is near the Linwood car plant. I mean, he had a pretty happy childhood from what I can see. You know, he had friends who he gave a lift to from Paisley at Glasgow University. and he used to charge them 20p for taking them in his Rover 3500, which is an amazing car for a 19-year-old graduate to have. But, yeah, his upbringing was not particularly exceptional, I don't think.

4:20Does it make sense in his childhood that people found him objectionable or difficult? He seemed to be regarded as quite a good bloke. Yeah, he was, and he played pinball at Glasgow University. He was in the championships, pinball championships, so he was a pinball wizard, while studying law at Glasgow University. There was no signs of this tyrannical, egotistical, narcissistic behaviour, which later became more prevalent. It's a wall mark. Yeah. But he decided, having done law at Glasgow, he doesn't decide to practise it or he goes into accountancy. Yes. His friends were very surprised by that because every single friend he went to Glasgow University with went straight into a Glasgow law firm to work as an apprentice, which is the normal thing to do if you've done a law degree.

5:02But Fred Goodwin didn't do that. He went to study accountancy and he joined a firm called Touche Ross, did this traineeship and became a chartered accountant. And then he became the youngest ever partner of Touche Ross, which later became then as Deloitte at the age of 29. He was highly ambitious. And that's his way into banking because he basically ends up working on a lot of banking clients. And then one of them, this fellow, Don Argus, who runs the National Australia Bank, buys Clydesdale Bank and thinks Fred, who's done such a fantastic job on the due diligence, is the man for him. Yes. So Fred had his entree into the world of banking, having been an auditor in, I think, 1995.

5:43So he was about 37 at the time. He was deputy chief executive of Clydesdale Bank, even though he had had no previous experience of banking, other than handling the liquidation of of a bank called BCCI and other than doing due diligence on the acquisition of Clydesdale for Don Argos. But it strikes me that one of the reasons someone like Fred gets sucked into the banking world is because it is a time when banking is becoming a much more acquisitive industry. There are lots of takeovers and Fred is there with his sharpened pencils doing the sums making the integrations work. So he's shining at that.

6:21Jonathan: Yes. And also banking is changing in another way which is there's a sort of IT revolution, the traditional model where a bank manager would sit in his bank branch and take godlike decisions is gone, and increasingly is going and being replaced by centralised systems. And systems is what Fred is good at, right? Yes. While Fred was at Clydesdale, the Royal Bank of Scotland under George Mathieson, who was then the chief executive, had gone through what they called a Chairman Mao-style revolution, of basically completely gutting the branches, getting rid of the fiefdoms where individual branch managers used to have a lot of power and say over who could borrow money and who couldn't, and centralised all the IT systems in a place called Drummond House in the Guile.

7:09So these sorts of things were going on exactly at that time. The problem with that was that customers, the kind of human element got lost. customers were basically they came to be seen as just people to whom you could cross sell products and you would score could we sell eight different products to one customer so one customer might have a current account and traditionally just use that and maybe use other suppliers for other things like insurance or a long-term savings account or investments but the goal of the banks at that time was to try to consolidate and get one customer to do a wider range of things with that bank and they were segmenting the customer base too so they'd segment by you know by teachers or they segment by different social groups whereas in the in the old times before IT they couldn't do that.

7:54I just wanted to touch on the Scottish banks at that time I suppose starting from the point in the early 1980s when there's a bid for the Royal Bank of Scotland even though the Royal Bank of Scotland had kind of invited a takeover bid public opinion essentially was very strongly against it and there was this view that this shouldn't happen. Yeah, I think it was in 81, the board of RBS led by Michael Harris, a landowner in Ayrshire, decided they would do a friendly merger and they'd sell RBS for 300 million pounds to Standard Chartered and the two banks would basically become one. Then HSBC jumped in with a higher offer worth 500 million pounds for Royal Bank of Scotland.

8:37Then a group of interested parties, including a man called Peter de Vink and Ian Noble and Angus Crossert, George Matheson as well who wasn't in banking yet, decided this had to be blocked. You couldn't have this cherished national institution, the Royal Bank of Scotland, headquartered in St. Andrew's Square. You couldn't possibly have this just being a part of the branched economy run from London or run from Hong Kong or whatever. So yeah, there was something called the Battle Royal to save the bank. And Lionel Barber played a big part in that when he was at the Scotsman. And the Fraser Ballander Institute came up with a line, which was, if this bank is allowed to be sold, then we're just going to be, what is it?

9:22Hewers of words. A society of hewers of words and drawers of water.

9:25Jonathan: It was a complete sort of political stitch up, really, because it was clearly in the interests of the shareholders of the bank to accept this bid. And the idea that somehow HSBC was this horrible foreign bank and had to be stopped was a triumph of PR over reality. In the end of the day, the Thatcher government, much to everyone's surprise, because she was seen as a believer in free markets, free market capitalism, she sided with the Scottish patriots, stroke nationalists, and blocked it. But what's interesting about that is that because of that, there's a kind of protective blanket thrown around Scottish banking, which basically gives them the space, if you like, to go and try and grow their businesses so that they won't be so vulnerable to bigger banks south of the border.

10:13It was called the Tartan Firewall or something like that had been placed around Bank of Scotland and Royal Bank of Scotland because the idea was if the Monopolies and Emergency Commission had blocked the HSBC and Standard Chartered Bids, they'd block any bid for a Scottish bank. But there was also anti-competitive practices in that, you know, they agreed not to fight on each other's turf. So Barclays wouldn't set up branches here, and the Bank of Scotland wouldn't set up branches in England, you know, that sort of thing.

10:40Jonathan: So regardless of the poor old customers, it's all done for the good of the banks themselves. That's a good point. But in the end of the day, by about 94, things were changing. And in 1994, there was this concept that came into being called eat or be eaten, i.e. if we don't go and take over other banks then we will get taken over ourselves. Meanwhile in 88 the Royal Bank had actually formed a strategic alliance with Santander whereby the two banks agreed to cooperate on certain things and had cross shareholdings in each other. To some extent that shows they were quite innovative. This is the kind of world in which Fred is catapulted into the chief executive's chair at Clydesdale in the mid-90s.

11:21Yes. I mean, does he actually know that much about banking? He didn't really have any idea. I mean, Alf Young, who's a former business journalist at the Glasgow Herald, told me the story. He went to interview Fred soon after Fred became chief executive of Clydesdale Bank. He saw like a rack of leaflets with details of mortgage offers in the foyer. And he asked Goodwin, who was by then chief executive of Clydesdale, which of these deals hand on heart is the best deal over 10 years goodwin showed no interest he refused to answer and for as far as half young is concerned this typified her banking was changing the product and serving the customer had been sacrificed on the altar of growth and goodwin's ego that may be said with the benefit of hindsight yeah yeah but he definitely felt very surprised that he had no interest in the products.

12:14Yeah, yeah.

12:14Jonathan: I knew Peter Burke quite well as a result of the later takeover, but he always said that his role in life was to make banking boring. And as we all know, he failed spectacularly in this because it made it more interesting. Indeed, 20 years on, it's still interesting. So he failed there. But I'm not so sure about the idea about eat or be eaten. I think it was much more he saw the opportunity, but I may be getting ahead of myself a bit here, but if you consider what happened when NatWest was a sort of lumbering giant of a bank and everybody knew it was badly run, and the NatWest board suddenly popped up with a bid for legal and general.

13:05Jonathan: Nobody had seen, nobody sealed the point of it, And at that point, Bert saw an opportunity of taking over this behemoth because nobody liked the bid for the legal in general as the market prices demonstrated. So that was, in my view, the genesis of Bank of Scotland's interest. But I just wanted to talk for a second before we get on to the NatWest bid and part in the whole Fred Goodwin story to talk about Fred's predecessor, George Matheson, who was the chief executive from the early 90s till the bid was successful. And he also represented a change from the historic, the sort of landowners and kind of dukes of Bucklew or whoever were on the board for generations.

13:54A radical change. He had, again, very little limited banking experience when he's joined in 87. He'd been a lecturer at St. Andrews or at Dundee University in electronics. He'd worked in Buffalo for an aviation company. He'd run 3I, which was previously called ICFC, which is private equity. He'd also run the SDA. So he'd done a fair amount. He'd run the Scottish Development Agency, which was Quango, which became known as Scottish Enterprise. enterprise. So but he wasn't an old school banker until that that point, every single person who became senior manager within RBS had worked their way up the ranks from 16.

14:34They joined the bank at 16. They didn't go to university, they did all their training with Chartered Institute of Banking Scotland, and worked their way gradually up until some like Charlie Winter became chief executive. George Matheson was a total change. But also, there is a definite more of a kind of empire building. It's not as if when NatWest comes along, the Royal Bank has never thought about making a takeover. No. They've had sniffs around the place. In 94, they tried to buy Cheltenham and Gloucester, which is a building society, but that was bought by Lloyds. They tried to buy Trustee Savings Bank, but that was bought by Lloyds.

15:09They tried to buy various other things, include Birmingham and Midshares, but that ended up being sold to Halifax. So they kept missing things basically and then they tried with Barclays when Barclays was looking weakened after Matthew Taylor had been fired and the bank was looking incredibly weak the share price was down they went to visit the then chief executive Sir Peter Middleton but they were told to basically get stuffed you know we're not letting some jumped up bank from Scotland buy Barclays it's the crown jewels of English finance prior to the NatWest debacle which you mentioned the two banks in Scotland had tried to do a joint carve-up takeover of NatWest, whereby one bank, the Royal Bank, would take certain parts, and the other bank, the Bank of Scotland, would take certain parts, but they'd fallen out over who would get what.

15:59So when Peter Burt made his surprise and highly audacious 21 billion OSTAR takeover offer for NatWest in September 99, RBS, I think, felt they had to follow suit with a rival bid. Yeah, I think that's right. But they were very anxious not to be hostile bidder, but to be a kind of friendly white knight. Yeah, they wanted to be seen as a white knight. And George Younger, who was then the chairman of Royal Bank of Scotland, was determined that it should be a friendly tie up whereby, you know, they'd agree to merge, basically. But that didn't work. So then they went hostile in November 99. And it gave rise to what, for me, was quite an exciting time in my journalistic career because the two largest companies in Scotland were engaged in a fight to the death for a bank that was at least three or four times their size headquartered in London.

16:51So it was an interesting time. I was working at the Lex column on the FT at that time and I remember writing the column about the Bank of Scotland, but I rather favoured the Bank of Scotland, which was headlined Hammered by the Scots. I like it. I didn't know you were doing I read it at the time. But sadly, Peter Burt's mood didn't pay off. But you have an idea of why NatWest, if you like, the bid was such a success.

17:18Jonathan: It was clearly a business which could be hugely improved. I think it's the only major takeover I can remember where the bidder won, not because the price was high but because they could afford to pay more than the other side so Bank of Scotland's much smaller bank and they'd reached the end of what they could offer Royal Bank could offer more so essentially NatWest was sold for the best that the biddy could pay rather than what it was worth. This is the point when Fred, Fred had obviously come in in the late 90s. He's the deputy chief executive, but it's not 100 % clear that he will be given the nod.

18:04And he tries in his usual charming way to persuade Gorge Mathewson to declare him in the air, but he won't. But he ends up getting the job. And the moment he gets the job is when the bid is successful in, well, just afterwards in 2000, he's basically dubbed the air. Why does Mathewson pick Goodwin? I think it was in about 97, George Matheson was told by George Younger that he had to find his own successor as chief executive of the bank. And he had two people in mind, one of whom was Ian Robertson, who ran the UK bank and had previously run the corporate bank and is a decent guy, I think. The other option was John McFarlane, who had just stepped down as chief executive of Standard Chartered.

18:50He tried both these people, tried to persuade them to become his successor at RBS, but neither wanted the job. In the end, Fred, I think Mathieson was probably getting a bit desperate. You know, he was supposed to be tasked with finding his own successor. And he happened to meet Fred Goodwin at the Committee of Scottish Clearing Banks. And he just thought this guy was amazing. He had such incredible intellect and speedy thought processes and ability to decipher complex financial information. Mathieson just had what he calls a eureka moment. So, right, this is the guy. We're going to get Fred Goodwin.

19:28And then the bit forces the timetable, I suppose, in that you've got to have somebody in place to do the integration. Yes, and I think technically, Mathieson was due to stay on for at least another nine months or so, but he decided to step down early in March 2000. So, the day they formally completed their acquisition of NatWest, he stood down and Fred Goodwin took over.

19:49Jonathan: To be fair to poor old Fred, who gets his character assassinated every day, that was a very good call because he was the right man for the job at the time. Yeah, he is widely regarded as having handled the integration of NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland magnificently. So certainly his purple patch as a banker was between 2000 and 2003 when he sacked 18 ,000 staff at NatWest out of 60 ,000. That's roughly one third. And he crunched together all the back office systems. I mean, there are some questions over whether some of this was over-egged, you know, in terms of the quality of the way that he did it.

20:30But overall, he's highly regarded for the way he did that. But I think there are two things about the takeover of NatWest which I think are quite important. One, it seems to me, from reading your book, was that the NatWest employees were quite pleased. They had read the newspapers, they had read Neil's excoriation of their boss, a series of bosses, and they had come to the conclusion that they were badly run. And so when somebody came along who seemed to want to make some quite sweeping changes, they were supportive. The second thing, which I think is no less important, was they all spoke English, which I think when it came to the Dutch, along with everything else, was a problem.

21:07Yes, there was a huge cultural issue there. There was a very sclerotic civil service type culture within National Westminster Bank. With Fred Goodwin, he had the slogan, make it happen, and it genuinely was the case. So I suppose on the Fred character question, is this the moment where he concludes from this that he essentially is a banking god and becomes a megalomaniac? Or do you think there were seeds to that already? I think there were seeds to that already. There'd been tyrannical behavior at Clydesdale. You know, there'd been some very unusual behavior when he was at Clydesdale. There were two things that made him believe he was God's gift to banking.

21:46The first of those was the way in which the integration of Matt West was received and covered, especially by Harvard Business School, because that really mattered to him. The premier business school in the world was setting this was an exemplary integration of any bank in the world, as far as integrating two banks was concerned. So that went to his head. But the other thing that went to his head was Forbes Global, which is the equivalent of Fortune, the leading American business title, put him on the front cover in January 2003 and said he was the global business leader of the year and wrote a rather unctuous article saying how fantastic Fred Goodwin was.

22:25Jonathan: And boy, if you wanted a better cell signal than that, you'd never find it. I know someone who knew him very well at the time, who basically said, Fred completely changed the moment the Forbes thing was published. But you have this, you have a story, which is a sad story in a way, about George Younger and his daughter, who worked for RBS, coming to see him when he was dying, basically. Yeah. With Fred. George Younger was basically on his deathbed in a hospice in Strathalon in 2002, dying of cancer, and he was with his daughter Joanna Younger who was called Joanna Davidson at the time. Fred arrived very excitable and full of himself and he had two things with him.

23:06One was a photograph of the Dassault Falcon 900E private jet that he'd just acquired. He bought for RBS and he was thrilled with it and the other was a floor plan of the new campus style headquarters which he was building, done by Michael Laird Architects in Gogoburn, which is a former psychiatric hospital to the west of Edinburgh. So he had these two things and he wanted to show them to his ex-chairman. And he said, George, look at this. This is the jet. Look at this. This is the plan for 350 million HQ Gogoburn. He then left the room and George Younger said to his daughter, Joanna, I think we better sell all our Royal Bank of Scotland shares.

23:47Jonathan: and he didn't no I don't think he did sadly the corporate jet and the custom built head office are of course seeing Northcote Parkinson's clear signals that megalomania yes and a fountain outside the office adds to it but he wasn't completely unaware of the impression these developments might create because he carefully parked his plane in France so that it wasn't on a kind of British register that would be easy to spot at the Royal Bank of Scotland plane. But before we get to ABN and the denouement of this sort of tragedy, we also have the point where Fred has made a series of takeover bids and so on in the early 2000s when he's coming off his high.

24:35He becomes very unpopular. He becomes very unpopular with analysts. He becomes unpopular with the shareholders. that reports are commissioned where the most extraordinary things are said about him and read out in board meetings. And people talk about the Goodwin discount on the shares. Why didn't the board see the way things were going and basically change horses at this point? They were very late to react. I mean, he'd already bought some pretty questionable assets, including Charter One in Cleveland, Ohio, for$10.5 billion. He bought First Active in Ireland, he bought Churchill Insurance in the UK, he bought Swiss Bank, he bought, you know, numerous assets.

25:15And Bank of China, I think, was the one of the latter ones in 2005. But the investors basically didn't like this. They thought, how is he going to create any value from these acquisitions? The share price was going more flaccid coming down from 2002. The board was very slow to react. And I think one of the reasons is that George Mathewson had only got the job as chairman on the premise that he would be a, inverted commas, hands-off chairman, which basically he seemed to interpret like, as meaning, let Fred do what he wants. Let's just quickly deal with ABN. Yeah. And how it comes about, basically, there were a lot of doubts about the wisdom of this, particularly at a time where it appeared to some parts of the world that all was not entirely functioning well beneath the decks of the HMS global economy.

26:07It was about April 2007 when Fred Goodwin and his colleagues on the board decided they should bid for ABN AMRO. And the reason for that was because he did not want to be usurped in size by Barclays, apparently. So he felt that if Barclays managed to merge with ABN AMRO, which is a huge bank, second biggest in the Netherlands, RBS would come down in the pecking order, basically, and be smaller than the Barclays ABN combine.

26:35Jonathan: And if you can think of a worse motive for a major acquisition or merger, it's hard to find. This was pure hubris. Yeah, because in August 2007, the credit crisis started when two hedge funds were closed by BNP Paribas. Yes. And so most observers of the financial scene, even me as a financial journalist, thought that this is getting quite serious. But apparently it just passed the beginning of the credit crisis when basically you can't borrow the ludicrous sums that RBS was intending to borrow to fund its acquisition of ABN Amro. It was no longer there. But one thing I would say is that Fred Goodwin and RBS did try to sort of placate their investors by launching something called a carve-up takeover.

27:23So he got onside Santander, who wanted a bank in Brazil, which ABN Amro owned, called Banco Real, and Anton Veneta, which is a bank in Italy. He got onside Fortis, which is a Benelux bank assurer. They wanted the Benelux branches of ABN Amro. And he wanted LaSalle, which was a bank. So this was the one bit. He was taking this enormous risk to buy this thing for one bit, which was this American chain of banks. In Chicago. and he couldn't get it because it was sold to somebody else.

27:54Jonathan: We were told constantly this was the jewel in the crown that he was going to get and then they sold it. There was nothing to stop them selling it, they sold it. Once again, they had to completely rewrite the reasons that they were expressing to the outside world as to why they were doing this. And they had a perfect opportunity to say, oh, well, in that case, we're not going to do it. But no, they persevered and they carried on digging the hole ever deep. Well, they pretended that Global Transaction Services, which was part of ABN AMRO, and the ABN AMRO Investment Bank, which was actually worthless because of the amount of exotic credit derivatives that it had accumulated.

28:35They claimed to their investors and to the media, July 2007, that these bits were the bits they really wanted. GTS and the Investment Bank.

28:44Jonathan: Which they'd hardly mentioned before. Well, they did also say they get 21 billion euros in cash for the sale of LaSalle. That's true. Apparently that all disappeared. They never got it. But also it strikes me looking at ABN, the shareholders voted 95 % in favour, even though we were always being told that they hated the idea of more takeovers by Fred. And here was an absolute car crash heading their way. The regulators who had to sign off on this thing, you know, only a few weeks later, you know, the British regulator stepped in to stop Barclays buying Lehman Brothers. Yes. But no one seemed to be that worried about this catastrophe.

29:24It was a year later, wasn't it? 2008. Yeah. But I think a senior person within the Financial Services Authority, which is the old regulator, the FSA, told me that up until 2008, their attitude was bankers knew what they were doing, bankers could be trusted, and bankers would be responsible because they're answerable to their shareholders. These were the three tenets of the way they supposedly regulated the banking sector. And I think that system applied up until October 2008 when the whole thing went belly up. I think the shareholder vote of 94.5 % voting in favor of RBS taking over ABN AMRO was a triumph of spin on the part of the board and Fred Goodwin.

30:07It's time to come to the accounting. So in 2008, Royal Bank Scotland collapses. so extended that the bank, with the biggest banking balance sheet in the world at the time, is within a few hours of running out of cash altogether. The UK has to end up jamming in 45 billion, which is only recouped, sold back 17 years later. And it's still at a 10.5 billion loss.

30:31Jonathan: Yeah, got a quarter of the money back. But how much of all this is down to Goodwin? How much down to all these other factors we've talked about? It did bad lending, bad investments and trading, atrocious mergers and acquisitions, very low capital, to the extent it had a core tier one of three around the time of its ABN acquisition. Courtier one means that if your assets are worth only 96 % of their book value, then essentially you're bust because your liabilities then exceed your assets. Exactly. And then the bad lending. I mean, I could go into that in a lot of depth. that I do in the book. Basically, they lend very, very badly, especially to commercial property, to leverage buyouts, and to exotic credit derivatives.

31:23Okay.

31:24Jonathan: You make so many mistakes that in the end, you are essentially bankrupt. And indeed, so are we. Okay. But it's worth noting that NatWest, or Royal Bank of Scotland, was not alone in having this sort of dynamic. Bank of Scotland, which merged with Halifax after the NatWest bid... And then it merged with Lloyd's. ...collapsed also in 2008. There is a way in which one could look at this and say that what happened to the Scottish banks is not dissimilar to what happened to the Icelandic banks or the Irish banks. I think to an extent it is small country syndrome. We are a small country of about 5 million people, 5.5, roughly that.

32:09And so maybe that means you kind of, the country has a different attitude towards a bank becoming huge. Certainly that's what the Icelandic people felt when Glitnir and their other banks, Land Bank and Kaupp thing, all became ginormous banks, which were totally impossible to bail out because the country's tiny. So maybe it has something to do with small country syndrome. In the end of the day, there was a climate. There was a climate where regulators believed in a light touch, where capital reissues were not even properly looked at by the regulators, where auditors cut corners or may have misrepresented assets or helped to misrepresent the value of assets.

32:48And Deloitte's, interestingly, were the RBS auditors throughout this period. But I don't think you can blame what happened to RBS just on that alone. and in my view at least 60 % of why it went wrong is down to the board including Fred Goodwin and the remaining 40 % is down to these other factors of poor regulation, poor quality auditing, etc. Well many thanks to Ian for taking us through the product of enormous amounts of research. He's pursued this with doggedness which very few journalists in my experience are capable of matching. I had hoped we would find some vague sense at the end of all this that there was an area in which Fred Goodwin was a disguised good bloke or great banker, but I'm afraid we've completely demolished him.

33:40So thank you very much to all of you. It's been really interesting, and thanks, Ian.

33:52Jonathan: That was a long time in finance. with Jonathan Ford and Neil Collins. Production and editing by Nick Hilton. Please rate and review it on your podcast app.