My new book, The Rise & Fall of the City of Money, starts and ends with a financial catastrophe. The Darien disaster of the early eighteenth century drove Scotland into union with England, but spawned the institutions which transformed Edinburgh into a global financial centre. The crash of 2008 wrecked the city’s two largest and oldest banks – and its reputation.
Category: Books
In 1995 Bank of Scotland celebrated 300 years as Britain’s oldest commercial bank. Voted ‘most admired bank’, respected by competitors, applauded by investors and trusted by customers, it looked forward to the next three hundred. Less than 15 years later it was bust, reviled as part of the spectacular collapse of HBOS, the conglomerate it had joined. One of the high-profile victims of the credit crunch, its spectacular fall caused seismic shock waves throughout the financial world. What went wrong?
Ray Perman, who has followed the Bank since the 1970s when he was a Financial Times journalist, uncovered the story from documents and dozens of interviews with people at the top in Bank of Scotland and HBOS – from being the bank of choice for the high-rolling Monte Carlo mega-rich to losing £10 billion.
It is a cautionary tale for our times. In the complex world of modern global finance, the brilliant men who ran the company ignored the simple banking rules that their predecessors learned the hard way three centuries before.
You can read more about the book on its own website (hubristhebook.com coming soon) and buy direct from Birlinn or Amazon.
The Man Who Gave Away His Island by Ray Perman is the biography of a remarkable man, John Lorne Campbell, who bought the Hebridean island of Canna and, with his American musician wife Margaret Fay Shaw, made it an international centre of Gaelic culture.
Ray fell in love with Canna on his first visit in 1977 when he went to interview Campbell about a campaign to save the island’s ferry service.
You can read more about the book on it’s own website: thecannastory.com and buy it from Birlinn or Amazon.