FREUD IN THE CITY

The ebook edition of David Freud’s universally acclaimed 2006 autobiographical account of his accidental career in the City and how, after a bruising 20 years, he emerged as one of the most successful investment bankers of his generation.

This is the inside story of some of the most interesting and controversial mega-deals of the period.

David Freud stayed at the sharp end of the business through his 20-year stint – conducting transactions in no fewer than 19 countries. Written with pace, humour and insight David Freud's now classic account of his work and life reveals the tensions, the rivalries, the cock-ups, and the break-neck pace of life in the City during this period.

Here is the reality of life in the City and it is far from the anonymous shuffling of money between faceless institutions. David’s career proved to be a battle-ground of individualism, dominated by powerful characters accustomed to taking tough decisions in a pressurised, gossip-fuelled environment.  And as the global revolution advanced, a sense of desperation ignited extreme levels of competition, with too many financial institutions jockeying for position in a diminishing marketplace.

David Freud was at the centre of it all. He played a pivotal role

• In the flotation of Eurotunnel, (“I later discovered I had sold the market a pup”) against the backdrop of Black Monday. 

• His Warburg Euro Disney team launched the first truly pan-European flotation, raising £600m – only to be faced with potential disaster when the price went into tail-spin. 

• The highs and lows of financing the Channel Tunnel Railway Link and admitting to Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, that they’d got their sums massively – by £1.2bn – wrong. 

He was part of the Warburg Group’s break-neck expansion which ended in humiliation and collapse. Then he played a key role in its renaissance as UBS when its new Swiss owners rebuilt the bank’s position - for a time at least - in the financial markets of London and around the world.