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In the past couple of years, the entire global lending industry has covered itself in shame. Virtually every banker was suckered by the credit and housing bubble. But who made the sorriest choices? Who forced shareholders and the public to bear the highest financial cost? Who, in short, is the Worst Banker in the World?
There's no dearth of candidates. Richard Fuld of Lehman Bros. (LEHMQ, news, msgs) and James Cayne of Bear Stearns presided over the remarkably disruptive failures of their respective companies.
But Bear and Lehman weren't banks, properly speaking: They were hedge funds lashed to investment banks. And their demises didn't require much of a public bailout. The failures of American International Group (AIG, news, msgs), Fannie Mae (FNM, news, msgs) and Freddie Mac (FRE, news, msgs) necessitated massive bailouts, but they weren't exactly banks, either.
Iceland's bankers have effectively brought their entire country to ruin. But since Iceland's population is a mere 300,000, they're off the hook. In an interview Monday, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman nominated the gang that ran Citigroup (C, news, msgs) into the ground. But Citi was so big it took three CEOs -- Sandy Weill, Chuck Prince and Vikram Pandit -- to bring it to the brink of disaster.
No, my nominee is someone whose name may not be familiar to American audiences. He's Fred Goodwin, who until October served as CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS, news, msgs). Goodwin (here's the Wikipedia entry about him) took the helm of RBS in 2000 and proceeded to turn it into an international powerhouse. Known as "Fred the Shred" for his willingness to cut costs -- and jobs -- he emerged as Britain's leading banker. He was even knighted in 2004 for services to banking.
But the bank, which last summer was Britain's largest, is now neither Royal nor Scottish nor much of a bank. RBS' slogan is "Make it happen." A review of the record shows that Goodwin indeed made it happen. He aced every requirement for a hubristic CEO.
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Let's review the record:
Carrying off mergers and acquisitions and calling them growth? Yes. After buying British bank Natwest for about 26.4 billion pounds (about $39 billion in today's dollars) in 2000, Goodwin used RBS' cash and highflying stock as a currency for more deals. Among the biggest was the $10.3 billion purchase of Charter One Financial, a Cleveland bank, in 2004, thus expanding the bank's footprint in the Rust Belt.
Ill-advised, history-making, massive merger precisely at the top? Yep. In November 2007, RBS and its partners, Fortis (FORSY, news, msgs) and Banco Santander (STD, news, msgs), completed their acquisition of Dutch bank ABN Amro. As proud adviser Merrill Lynch (MER, news, msgs) noted, the $101 billion deal was "the world's largest bank takeover and one of the most complex M&A transactions ever." And it closed almost precisely when the air started to come out of the global lending bubble.
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