On the 10-year anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy, the event commonly cited as the start of a global financial crisis, it’s still worth asking: What the hell happened? The Bank that Lived a Little: Barclays in the Age of the Very Free Market (Penguin Random House), a new book by former banker and financial commentator Philip Augar, is a timely tale of the folly of bank deregulation, unchecked greed, and wild ambition. Augar’s book is a dramatized retelling of Barclays’ history,...

Bond traders have had a rough time recently, as their ranks have thinned since the financial crisis due to stricter regulations and the decline in manually intensive voice trading. They now face their toughest challenge yet, with AI-enabled automation threatening jobs across the industry. Goldman Sachs recently reported three consecutive quarters of decline in revenue at its bond-trading division. Overall, the number of fixed-income traders on banks’ desks last year fell by 7%, to 17,500,...