The Rise and Fall of the City of Money

This is the colourful story of how Edinburgh rose to be one of the top 10 financial centres in Europe – and how the crisis of 2008 decimated its banking, insurance and investment institutions. Written by award-winning journalist Ray Perman who has reported on the Edinburgh financial industry for 40 years.

---

It started and ended with a financial catastrophe. The Darien disaster of 1700 drove Scotland into union with England, but spawned the institutions which transformed Edinburgh into a global financial centre. The crash of 2008 wrecked the city’s two largest and oldest banks – and its reputation.  In the three intervening centuries, Edinburgh became a hothouse of financial innovation, prudent banking, reliable insurance and smart investing.  The face of the city changed too as money transformed it from medieval squalor to Georgian elegance.



This is the story, not just of the institutions which were respected worldwide, but of the personalities too, such as the  two hard-drinking Presbyterian ministers who founded the first actuarially-based pension fund; Sir Walter Scott, who faced financial ruin, but wrote his way out of it; the men who financed American railways and eastern rubber plantations with Scottish money; and Fred Goodwin, notorious CEO of RBS, who took the bank to be the biggest in the world, but crashed and burned in 2008.