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High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg
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About High Financier: The Lives And Time Of Siegmund
Product Description Bestselling author Niall Ferguson reveals for the first time the true extent of Siegmund Warburg's influence-and the lessons we can learn in a time of crisis from the last of the high financiers. "Success from the financial and from the prestige point of view . . . is not enough; what matters even more is . . . adherence to high moral and aesthetic standards." -Siegmund Warburg, 1959 In this pathbreaking new biography, based on more than ten thousand hitherto unavailable letters and diary entries, bestselling author Niall Ferguson returns to his roots as a financial historian to tell the story of Siegmund Warburg, an extraordinary man whose austere philosophy of finance offers much insight today. A refugee from Hitler's Germany, Warburg rose to become the dominant figure in postwar City of London and one of the architects of European financial integration. Seared by the nearcollapse and then "Aryanization" of his family's long-established bank in the 1930s and then frustrated by the stagnation of its Wall Street sister, Kuhn Loeb, in the 1950s, Warburg resolved that his own firm of S. G. Warburg (founded in 1946) would be different. An obsessive perfectionist with an aversion to excessive risk, Warburg came to embody the ideals of the haute banquet-high finance- always eschewing the fast buck in favor of gilt-edged advice. He was not only the master of the modern merger and founder of the eurobond; he was also a key behind-the-scenes adviser to governments in London, Tokyo, and Jerusalem-to his critics, a "financial Rasputin." Like a character from a Thomas Mann novel, Warburg was a complex and ambivalent man, as much a psychologist, politician, and actor-manager as he was a banker. In High Financier Niall Ferguson shares the first book-length examination of a man whose life and work suggest an alternative to the troubled business principles that helped shape our current financial landscape. From Publishers Weekly Siegmund Warburg (1902–1982), scion of a Jewish banking dynasty, fled Nazi Germany to London, where he became a leading banker and an informal economic adviser to prime ministers—but his importance doesn't shine through this unfocused biography. Financial historian Ferguson ( The Ascent of Money) styles him a financial innovator (he engineered Britain's first hostile takeover), a pioneer of European economic integration (he helped invent the Eurobond), a prophet of globalization, a paragon of fiscal rectitude whose principles could have helped us avoid the current economic mess, and a deep thinker about international affairs. Unfortunately, Ferguson doesn't make a compelling argument for his subject's significance. Laymen will find his sketchy treatment of Warburg's feats of high finance rather opaque and his case for Warburg the humanist and intellectual weak (and undermined by his subject's obsession with handwriting analysis). Ferguson uses Warburg's life as a window onto European unification and Britain's postwar economic malaise, but his account, which is constantly distracted by deal making and office politics at Warburg's banking partnership, is too unsystematic to do these topics justice. The view from Warburg's lofty perch doesn't make for a discerning perspective on the world around him. (July) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist No longer the banking force it formerly was, the Warburg name belongs to historians now. Ron Chernow chronicled the clan in The Warburgs (1993), and here the notable economic historian Ferguson (The Ascent of Money, 2008) depicts Siegmund Warburg (1902–82), who in his prime was the most important and influential member of the family. Verbose for someone trained in accountancy, Warburg amassed written opinions about virtually everything, furnishing Ferguson with an abundance of source material that he synthesizes with a practiced hand. Throughout his life, Warburg was never passionately intere
