Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
Something's rotten in retail banking
The Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards has released its report into the fall of HBOS. And it is damning. It paints a picture of HBOS as probably the worst-run bank in the UK - a poster child for how not to run a bank. Management incompetence and self-delusion, a highly aggressive and ill-thought-out expansion strategy, totally inadequate risk management and a culture that rewarded excessive risk-taking and silenced those who sought to raise concerns. It could hardly be worse. More importantly, the findings for the first time brought to light the fundamental misunderstandings of the problems in banking that have persisted, and even been encouraged, since the financial crisis. I have felt like a lonely voice pointing out that HBOS, Northern Rock and the other UK banks that failed, with the sole exception of RBS, were RETAIL banks, and that neither ring fencing nor reform of investment banking was going to deal with the problems. But it seems that in the case of HBOS, the C
