The best business books of 2014

Reviewed: the inside story of what went wrong at RBS, the Federal Reserve and the Eurozone

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(Image credit: 2008 AFP)

Shredded: Inside RBS, the Bank that Broke Britain Fred Goodwin, the former head of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), has become one of the most notorious symbols of the excesses that lead to the 2008 financial crisis. What’s more, his legacy is still with us in the form of the £45bn bill for bailing out RBS. Shredded: Inside RBS, the Bank that Broke Britain, by Ian Fraser, looks at what went wrong. While Fraser makes it clear that Goodwin alone cannot solely bear the blame for the crisis or the bank’s fate, nor does he “stint on juicy detail about Fred’s behaviour”, as Colin Donald in The Sunday Herald put it. Indeed, this “magisterial” book will survive long beyond the crisis to become a “what-not-to-do textbook of management science”. It “would also make a cracking film, if toned down for the sake of realism”.Shredded: Inside RBS, the Bank that Broke Britain, by Ian Fraser. Published by Birlinn (£25)

Stress Test Other than Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke, no-one was closer to the heart of the efforts to deal with the financial crisis than Timothy F Geithner. Bernanke’s right hand man at the Fed from 2003 to 2009, he was deeply involved with many of the decisions taken as the credit crunch evolved into a full-blown panic. Then, during the aftermath, he was Barack Obama’s Treasury Secretary from 2009 to 2013. Geithner’s memoir, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises, gives his side of the story in this clearly written account. It’s “a really good book”, writes Michael Lewis in The New York Times. And although you may not agree with all of the decisions that were taken at the time of the bail-outs, “there’s hardly a moment in Geithner’s story when the reader feels he is being anything but straightforward”.Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises, by Timothy F Geithner. Published by Random House (£25).

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