The Death of the Banker: The Decline and Fall of the Great Financial Dynasties and the Triumph of the Sma Ll Investor

Front Cover
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Jul 14, 1997 - Biography & Autobiography - 130 pages
"For anyone interested in the world behind the business-page headlines, this is the book to read." --Publishers Weekly

With the same breadth of vision and narrative élan he brought to his monumental biographies of the great financiers, Ron Chernow examines the forces that made dynasties like the Morgans, the Warburgs, and the Rothschilds the financial arbiters of the early twentieth century and then rendered them virtually obsolete by the century's end.

As he traces the shifting balance of power among investors, borrowers, and bankers, Chernow evokes both the grand theater of capital and the personal dramas of its most fascinating protagonists. Here is Siegmund Warburg, who dropped a client in the heat of a takeover deal because the man wore monogrammed shirt cuffs, as well as the imperious J. P. Morgan, who, when faced with a federal antitrust suit, admonished Theodore Roosevelt to "send your man to my man and they can fix it up."  And here are the men who usurped their power, from the go-getters of the 1920s to the masters of the universe of the 1980s. Glittering with perception and anecdote, The Death of the Banker is at once a panorama of twentieth-century finance and a guide to the new era of giant mutual funds on Wall Street.

"Chernow . . . delivers a sound, accessible account of the forces shaping capital, credit, currency, and securities markets on the eve of a new millennium. "
--Kirkus Reviews

From inside the book

Contents

The Death of the Banker
3
TYCOONS
87
The Warburgs
107
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1997)

Educated at Yale and Cambridge University in England, Ron Chernow is a biographer who specializes in hard-hitting exposes on historical business figures. Among Chernow's early accomplishments was his unmasking of corruption in Chinatown for New York magazine in 1973. In the book The House of Morgan, winner of the National Book Award in 1990, Chernow outlines the extraordinary path of J.P. Morgan's empire and its influence on the American banking industry. Chernow is also the author of Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, which chronicles the life and times of the richest man in the United States in the early 1900s. His other work includes The Warburgs, The Death of a Banker, Alexander Hamilton, Washington: A Life, and Grant. Chernow is regular guest on the National Public Radio programs Fresh Air with Terry Gross and All Things Considered.

Bibliographic information