The Life and Times of Dillon Read: 2 Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Robert Sobel wrote the best biography of Calvin Coolidge I have seen so far, which means best of five. Even better than Coolidge's autobiography. His contextualization of Coolidge included astute observations on the American economy, and on Wall Street in particular. So I searched out this out of print book on an online service and began to read. To Dillon Read.
This is the firm which gave us George H.W. Bush's treasury secretary, Nicholas Brady, whom Sobel also covers pretty thoroughly in this book, hinting that his undergrad grades were not so hot and that he may be dyslexic. But great connections.
Clarence Dillon is the star of the book, which starts with the Dutchman Vermilye and his investment trading operation in New York. Dillon joins after Read joins, and Dillon is the gutsy Jewish guy (although Dillon cloaks that in an effort to run with the WASP dominators of New York at the time) who engineers brash and bold, huge deals, then makes a lot more money by taking over companies (buying them by lending them money) and hiring "management" firms secretly owned by....Clarence Dillon.
The Pecora hearings are profiled, and Sobel gets into the 1933 and 1934 Securities laws and the SEC, giving us the impression that Pecora was a little extreme, and the SEC--although harshly received by the "Street" at the time--was a pretty good idea.
Sobel does not stop there, though. He follows the Dillon Read firm past Clarence, and on to Douglas (who also became a Secretary of the Treasury, but who didn't have the same pizzazz of the old man, who drifted off into old age in aristocratic fashion on a huge New Jersey estate). Then on to the Bechtel and Wallenberg family connections of Dillon Read, and terminating in the mid 1980s with a glimpse of new ways-a-borning with the addition of New Court Capital and the opening of the firm to modern V.C. investment.
A great companion to this book is the very recent book "The Last Partnerships" which does the same biographical analysis of our entire economy, by profiling a whole collection of investment firms, Dillon Read included. Sobel has less range, in comparison, but Sobel's mission is to drill into Dillon Read. This book does not "sing" like Sobel's Coolidge, as I said, but forms a link in Sobel's scholarship which I'm glad to have. Next will come a read of Sobel's history of the New York Stock Exchange, to lengthen the chain.

Click Here to see more reviews about: The Life and Times of Dillon Read: 2

Click here for more information about The Life and Times of Dillon Read: 2

Read More...

High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Ferguson's biography of Siegmund Warburg will be of strong interest for readers who find financial news interesting and are looking for a broader perspective on the geopolitics of finance, in particular Britain and the European bond market. It will surely be of less interest to general readers, especially American readers, than some of Ferguson's writings on more contemporary issues, and frankly would not be selling so well were the author someone other than Mr. Ferguson.
"High Financier" can be divided into three parts based on the word "Lives" in the subtitle. The first "life" of Siegmund Warburg was his German one, from 1902-1933, covered in the first 90 pages of the book. His second "life" was his "Anglo-American" life - this runs from 1934 through the 1950s, or about page 200 in the book. The focus here is on Warburg's efforts at increasing transatlantic financial ties. The remainder of the book, slightly more than half, includes his "Anglo-German" life, or his work from the 1950s through his death in 1982 which primarily focused on European integration.
That first part will be of most interest to readers interested in German history and the interwar period. One intriguing point is what Ferguson describes as Warburg's ambivalent feelings toward the Nazi rise to power. As an educated German Jew he was of course repelled by their anti-Semitism and thuggish manner. Yet Warburg's diary and correspondence show that elements of the Nazi program appealed to him. This appears to be because as a life-long man of the political left, Warburg felt a strong attraction to collectivist policy and hostility for the decadence of the bourgeoisie, and thus hoped a coalition government including them might do some good. Ferguson's point is that if even someone like Warburg could fail to understand the Nazis' true nature until 1934, we should be more understanding of people in other countries who took even longer.
Ferguson goes to some effort to portray Warburg as an active opponent of the Nazis once he fully realized the threat, but he tries too hard. He claims Warburg to have been "an ardent opponent of the policy of appeasement," but cites no public anti-Hitler statements prior to 1939. All of the footnotes cite his diary and private correspondence. Indeed, during the 1934-1939 period Warburg traveled to Germany regularly for business, and was never bothered by the regime. All his family had left the country except two uncles who had chosen to stay to maintain the family business. Maybe it was because he didn't become a British citizen until 1939, or maybe he was concerned about his uncles. But despite all the talk about "spiritual values," it is hard not to suspect that Warburg's life priorities were no different than those of any other banker.
In regard to Warburg's "Anglo-American" life, he spent some time in the U.S. at a young age in the late 1920s, before the crash, and with part of the Warburg family firmly established in New York. He considered first going there, but after moving to London in 1934 he was heavily involved in cross-Atlantic finance before his focus moved back toward the continent.
Warburg's third life, taking up just over half the book, is his Anglo-German life. I say that - and this is a term Ferguson uses himself - because while living in the UK is business focused primarily on European finance and the need for greater integration. Whether Warburg was as important as Ferguson claims, I don't know enough about British financial history 1945-1980 to judge. But he portrays Warburg as the father of the hostile takeover in Britain, and as key to the rise of the Eurobond market and to London's revival as a financial center generally.
Warburg does seem to have been a master of business management. Ferguson devotes significant space to Warburg correspondence on the principles of a banker's work and good management practices. I won't go into that here, but readers interested in business philosophy may find these segments fruitful.
Warburg was also a strategic visionary. Ferguson consistently portrays him as being ahead of his contemporaries when it comes to business and finance. But he also presents him as being farsighted in geo-strategic terms, foreseeing the synthesis of Kennan's containment and Kissinger's détente. In 1954 Warburg wrote that the keys to victory were "building up the strength of the Western allies, second, raising the standard of living in the East (particularly in South-East Asia), and third, by a relaxation of tension..."


Click Here to see more reviews about: High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg

Get 61% OFF

Click here for more information about High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg

Read More...