Gosling's Grouse: Good versus greed

GOSLING'S GROUSE

Every soap opera needs a bad guy - and Bob Diamond fits the bill nicely, as Fred the Shred Goodwin of RBS did a couple of years.

They are infamous partly because they earned so much money, arguably too much money for the value they created. That is whether you define value as a growth in share price or, in their cases, drop in share price, or something more intangible. What about happiness of customers or employees? They would fail on that measure as well. The main problem with Bob and Fred is the public has come to view them as typical and indicative of many, if not all, senior people within the wider financial services industry. It is, of course, not the case, and the same can be true at the advisory end of t...