What do you think?
Rate this book
Westpac: The Bank that Broke the Bank
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 26, 2021
Carew is nothing if not thorough. 3 stars - not for a lack of quality, but for unceasing dryness of material. To the reviewer who described it as a 'riveting read' - may God have mercy on your soul.
Carew has clearly invested extensive time and effort into chronicling the rise and fall of Westpac. The tome would have benefitted from more stringent editing, both for grammatical clarity and narrative quality. The lack of conciseness truly weighs the book down.
Overall, this is a well-written book for those interested in the nitty gritty details of Australian finance. By nitty gritty, I mean you will hear about every last breath a Westpac board director takes. Like I said: detailed.
Godspeed, Ms Carew.
Carew has clearly invested extensive time and effort into chronicling the rise and fall of Westpac. The tome would have benefitted from more stringent editing, both for grammatical clarity and narrative quality. The lack of conciseness truly weighs the book down.
Overall, this is a well-written book for those interested in the nitty gritty details of Australian finance. By nitty gritty, I mean you will hear about every last breath a Westpac board director takes. Like I said: detailed.
Godspeed, Ms Carew.
August 28, 2024
3 stars, but not because it's bad or average. Indeed, Edna manages a very thoroughly researched series of events. It's 3 stars simply because it was a well-written, if a little dry, book about the banking and finance sector, of which I typically have no interest in. To John Phillips who said it was a riveting read, I sincerely ask if you are well, because riveting is the exact opposite of what I would call it.
In actual reading time, it did not take me over a month to finish, probably closer to 3 weeks to chip through. Just had a frenzied crochet blanket making detour not long after I started.
In actual reading time, it did not take me over a month to finish, probably closer to 3 weeks to chip through. Just had a frenzied crochet blanket making detour not long after I started.
July 21, 2017
Very extensive account of a bank turn-around.
January 17, 2016
The Financial Crisis of the 2007-09 was muted in Australia in part because of the banking crisis Australia underwent in the early 1990s.
Carew describes this as "a story of hubris, greed, vision, arrogance, ambition, fear and incompetence' which very nearly destroyed an iconic Australian bank.
Carew expertly narrates a litany of disasters at one of Australia's Big 4 banks: poor management of a subsidiary; questionable FX loans; a rush to globalisation; the absence of a centralised reporting system to monitor group-wide exposures; a failed technology project (CS90); and the consequences of a collapse in property prices.
Many of these same factors have troubled other banks in the years since Westpac's near implosion. At Westpac, as occurred in the recent US financial crisis "almost everyone - except the bank itself - had seen the cataclysm approaching."
This book should be re-read by bankers at least once a decade.
Carew describes this as "a story of hubris, greed, vision, arrogance, ambition, fear and incompetence' which very nearly destroyed an iconic Australian bank.
Carew expertly narrates a litany of disasters at one of Australia's Big 4 banks: poor management of a subsidiary; questionable FX loans; a rush to globalisation; the absence of a centralised reporting system to monitor group-wide exposures; a failed technology project (CS90); and the consequences of a collapse in property prices.
Many of these same factors have troubled other banks in the years since Westpac's near implosion. At Westpac, as occurred in the recent US financial crisis "almost everyone - except the bank itself - had seen the cataclysm approaching."
This book should be re-read by bankers at least once a decade.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews