The Death of the Banker, Ron Chernow
The Death of the Banker, Ron Chernow
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The Death of the Banker
The Decline and Fall of the Great Financial Dynasties and the Triumph of the Small Investor

Author: Ron Chernow

Narrator: Michael Kramer

Unabridged: 4 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/25/2017


Synopsis

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.

About Ron Chernow

Ron Chernow won the National Book Award in 1990 for his first book, The House of Morgan, and his second book, The Warburgs, won the Eccles Prize as the Best Business Book of 1993. His biography of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Titan, was a national bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Maynard on July 11, 2017

I'm giving this book a low rating. Nonetheless I think it's worth reading as an intellectual exercise. Ron Chernow, in page after page, parrots the American elite consensus of the post-Reagan years --- the glorification of finance, the value of financial innovation, how Germany and Japan are lagging......more

Goodreads review by Bill on February 14, 2018

Almost unfair to give this 3 stars due to it being written in the late 90's. Chernow is one of our great authors and I have read several of his books. If I read this at the time it was written it would have been an easy 4 stars. Even though so much has happened in the financial world this book still......more

Goodreads review by Diana on November 21, 2017

Author of two extensive biographies The House of Morgan and The Warburgs, this book is basically a condensed version of the two, or a summation. None the less it is interesting and informative detailing the history of investment banking and the great financial empires. It also concludes with a shor......more

Goodreads review by Lis on October 31, 2017

Ron Chernow is one of the great historians of banking and finance, and this is a look at one of the great transitions in that history: the death of what was for a long time the dominant kind of banking, the fall of the great financial dynasties. Many of those dynasties were born originally as mercha......more

Goodreads review by Leah on December 03, 2017

This is a collection of essays about the banking dynasties (Morgan, Rockefeller, Rothschild, etc.) that is just fascinating. Ron Chernow is a great nonfiction writer, giving you plenty of facts, but making them palatable and not overdry. This has lost a tiny bit of its relevancy because it was publi......more