If you are looking for a bit of light reading over the weekend, I can recommend a new two-hundred-and-fifty-page report about Barclays Bank, a venerable British lending institution that, during the past decade or so, has transformed itself into a hard-charging global colossus that competes with the likes of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Deutsche Bank. (As a matter of local interest, Barclays has its name on the new sports stadium a few blocks from where I live in Brooklyn.)
After narrowly surviving the financial crisis, during which it bought some remnants of Lehman Brothers, Barclays got embroiled in a series of scandals, including efforts to rig a key interest rate, the LIBOR. These scandals, combined with the firm’s generous pay structure, enraged the British public, prompted questions in Parliament, and generally saw Barclays excoriated as a festering example of all that has gone wrong with banking. Last summer, the Barclays board forced out the firm’s chief executive, Bob Diamond, a flashy American who was once a bond trader, and asked a prominent British lawyer, Anthony Salz, to conduct a review of its internal culture and practices.
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