From Mark Carney to Paul Flowers: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in the City

Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. And that cliché was never truer than when Bobby P (as he’s known in West Coast hip-hop circles) became the business editor for BBC News in February 2006, just before the smelly stuff hit the fan. He held Ordinary Joe’s hand as the world moved from crisis to crisis in the years following his appointment and told us about fun things such as collateralised debt obligations and credit default swaps. But more importantly than that, he spoke to us with such absurd intonations that it was impossible not to find everything he said hilarious. Thus, he made the credit crunch seem quite amusing and, arguably, in so doing, single-handedly dragged us out of recession. 

Bob’s reputation as a dubious character was cemented when he was referred to as ‘the unacceptable face of banking’ by the notorious paragon of virtue Peter Mandelson (though his chief gripe seemed to be that the Barclays CEO earned shedloads of cash). The reason he makes this list is because of his unwavering lack of modesty, his somewhat premature pronouncement in 2011 that banks’ “period for remorse and apology needs to be over” – and the rather unfortunate subsequent revelations about his bank’s role in the Libor manipulation scandal while he was running the show.

Of all the financial dingbats to have graced the headlines over the past decade, none are more absurd than the ‘Crystal Methodist’. The middle-aged church minister and chairman of the ‘ethical’ Co-operative Bank was caught red-handed buying cocaine and crystal meth. Not only was this pillar of the community a drug addict, he was also a gormless chairman: when asked by a Parliamentary committee what his bank’s assets were, he got the answer wrong by a factor of 16. What a muppet.

I’m sorry to include the ex-governor of the Bank of England on this list because he seems like a nice enough chap, but he is also, without doubt, a bit of a numpty. His extraordinary unwillingness to tackle the housing bubble in the mid-2000s (together with his compadre across the pond, Alan Greenspan) helped ensure that the ensuing financial crisis was deep and long. The release of documents in January 2015 have revealed that Mervyn and his mates at the Bank of England didn’t have any inclination of the impending disaster that was facing them. Nostradamus he ain’t.