Last week there was a flurry of big job news at Barclays. Britain’s last remaining universal bank with a proper transatlantic presence brought in a couple of heavyweight board members and appointed a new duo to lead the investment banking division.
It would be unfair to call this deckchair-moving on the Titanic — Barclays is not in the kind of existential crisis that it and many others faced in 2008. But the scale of changes does feel piffling compared with the bank’s woeful stock market performance versus its peers.
That is true however you define Barclays’ peer group. Its valuation — on the basis of share price to book value — is lower than the UK’s other big four banks. NatWest, the former RBS group that is still majority owned by the government after its 2008 bailout, is trading on a valuation nearly double Barclays’ 48 per cent of book. And Barclays is rated way below equivalent US banks. The best of the Wall Street bunch, Morgan Stanley, is trading above 175 per cent of book.