Martin Vander Weyer, The Spectator’s veteran City correspondent, was born to the business purple. The son of a Barclays executive, he followed his father into the bank, trotted the financial globe and had an inside view of that venerable institution’s near-death experience in the 1990s, which he chronicled in his first book, Falling Eagle: The Decline of Barclays Bank (2000). That particular death notice proved somewhat premature. Nonetheless, he had a ringside seat when the next major financial crisis, the global hurricane triggered by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, came. So did he see it coming? 

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