High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg

Siegmund becomes resident alien in UK in April Many more left but even more staid in Germany to face their ultimate decimation. Human thinking fatally misses to recognize the bigger arch of development. A sequence of events, of even incontrovertible adversity, when brought in by incremental political changes confound individual decision making. All the time people expected that each of the gradually introduced acts is the last, that it wasn't possible to get worse. Bulgaria, late s, I was in high school. I fondly remember the only TV program devoted to world economy that I used to follow.

Not infrequently a topic, apart from others I didn't understand, was the Eurodollar.

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There was nobody around to explain to me what Eurodollar was but surprisingly the word got stuck in my mind. A dormant curiosity until I stumbled upon the topic for a second time in Ferguson's book. Europe after the Second World War was clogged by frustratingly regulated capital and currency markets. A British citizen, for example, could purchase foreign securities only as part of a currency pool entirely controlled by the government. At the same time Europe was flush with dollars.

What if a bond is denominated in dollars, thought Warburg -- it evades strict currency exchange rate regime on one hand, and mops up the excess of savings denominated in it. For some humor, Warburg imagined the typical investor to be the mythical figure of the Belgian dentist -- a high-earning individual, living in a country with a bureaucratic tax system where domestic bonds were liable to tax at source, and where there was a limited choice of investment opportunities. Educational but this part of the book is much weaker than the story of his formative years and the ascent of Hitler.

Some times very inspiring quotations from his letters and notes seemed detached, like an abstract philosophical construct, wisdom which I couldn't pin directly to events in his life.

• High Financier: the Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg by Niall Ferguson: review - Telegraph!
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For me that was one of the book's weaknesses. Aug 10, Blog on Books rated it really liked it. In this page volume — complete with archival tree, graphology and extensive notes — Ferguson reveals Warburg to be both mercurial yet oft-times benevolent, moralistic yet powerful, as well as a macro-thinker and part-time psychologist in dealing with the financial affairs of the mid-century British industrial empire and the further concept of European economic integration. For example, after his steerage of the floundering British Aluminum industry via a hostile takeover from Reynolds, Warburg attempted to turn the beleaguered British automotive industry into a free market success, centered around the British-Leyland merger despite the reversal through both nationalization as well as the eventual sale to foreign owners Ford of the revered brands Jaguar, Rover and MG.

Next, Warburg found himself being asked to play a lead role in preventing the monopolization of the unstable newspaper business of Fleet Street.

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Both scenarios have obvious parallels with profoundly similar issues today. Through it all, Warburg stood not as a person of unusual personality or extreme idiosyncrasies, but as a man of great scope, knowledge and principle; always looking at the big picture and its effect on the economic, and thus political, outlook for Britain and the further European continent.

Warburg and his board were weary of speculators and hustlers who were often attempting to corrupt the commerce and private economic system for their own gain; a historical lesson that could prove useful for the investment banking industry on Wall Street today. It will be curious to see what his next subject is rumored to be either Henry Kissinger or another work on the Rothschilds and where that places him along this continuum.

High Financier: the Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg by Niall Ferguson: review

You can read more on finance and economics from Niall Ferguson here. Aug 05, Miguel rated it liked it. However, when it comes to his scholarly work, I have to will myself to read through to the end. You sometimes feel as if you were listening to him distractedly hurrying through a graduate seminar as he daydreams about his next appointment with Henry Kissinger. In this biography of the unofficial founder of the postwar City of London and the creator of the Eurobond market, Ferguson has a clearly didactic ambition: However, he discharges his duty in such a bloodless fashion that you sometimes wonder if he was even more tortured by ennui than his reader.

Apr 03, Marks54 rated it liked it. Niall Ferguson is a prolific historian of people and things economic who seems to be able to write faster than many people can read. This biography of Siegmund Warburg is a fine example of his work.

This biography follows Siegmund into the business and traces its and his development through the , including the takeover of the firm by the Niall Ferguson is a prolific historian of people and things economic who seems to be able to write faster than many people can read. This biography follows Siegmund into the business and traces its and his development through the , including the takeover of the firm by the Nazis, to the postwar period, to the central role of Warburg and his firm in launching the rebirth of finance and the City of London into worldwide financial prominence in the s and s.

Along the way, it is a story of the evolution of these firms that were founded by extraordinary individuals but grew as the industry morphed as well to a point where the founder arguably got in the way of the further progress of the firm. The writing, as always with Ferguson, is very crisp. The story works well in conjunction with related books - Chernow's history of the Warburg family, and Charles Ellis' history of Goldman Sachs The Partnership and shows the interaction of industry evolution, economic changes, and strong personalities.

A really well done history of a financial titan and his firm. Apr 09, Jc rated it it was ok Shelves: It took 12 years for NF to write this book. He obviously accumulated a lot of information and he regurgitates too much of it.

Consequently we get a book written by an academic for academics, definitely not as good as the Ascent of Money which was aimed at a slightly larger audience. We get very little on his achievements as a banker. The fact it all ended in the collapse of British industry is probably more due to the political regime Wilson and the lack of good material to work with than due to bad merger advice by Warburg.

Altogether not a very good book. Apr 02, Stuart Kinross rated it really liked it. A fascinating biography that provides an insight into the reasons for Siegmund Warburg's highly successful career. Mother and wife apart, Warburg was more interested in relationship banking than in most of his relations, "selected relationship in contradiction to blood relationships". He fell in and out of these selected relationships, as some of his proteges learned to their cost. However, he claimed that most of his firm's "substantial transactions" were "the result of cultivation of contacts over very many years".

High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg by Niall Ferguson

He was notoriously eccentric in the way he chose people to work for him — trusting graphologists and hiring people if they shared his enthusiasm for Thomas Mann, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy and Trollope not a bad list, it has to be said. He was a workaholic and he brought round-the-clock work to his own company well before the wider development in this direction after Big Bang. One of the bank's strange practices was to have two lunch sessions, one succeeding the other. On a personal note, I cannot resist ending by mentioning that when my late father-in-law, Maurice Stonefrost, was director-general of the Greater London Council, with its prominent role in the Eurobond market, he was much in demand at Warburg's and was invited to lunch by two different directors on the same day.

High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg

Demonstrating that Warburg's internal communications were not infallible, he went straight from the first lunch to the second. Topics Business and finance books The Observer. Order by newest oldest recommendations. At work, he insisted on daily meetings, orderly desks, spartan lunches and — impressively — more concern with making money for clients than for the bank.

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