High Financier - The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg

[giofranchi]

[amazonsearch]High Financier - The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg[/amazonsearch]

 

Happiness in life consists in fulfilment of duties and not of desires.

What has to be done must be done with the utmost thoroughness; what has to

be thought over must be thought through to its ultimate consequences; and

what has been identified as the right objective, must be pursued with

uncompromising tenacity.

--Lucie Warburg, mother of Siegmund Warburg

 

giofranchi

[giofranchi]

Nevertheless, it was Peter Stormonth Darling who gave the simplest answer to the question of why S. G. Warburg disappeared. ‘Those at the helm’, he wrote, simply ‘forgot to follow some of Siegmund’s most basic rules. Most of all, he sought to guard against the complacency that followed success and which he sensed could too often lead to what he called “expansion euphoria”.’

As we look back on a decade of worldwide ‘expansion euphoria’ that opened the twenty-first century, an era in which the big Western banks were the principal cheerleaders for unfettered financial markets and the most reckless risk-takers – an era which ended in the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression – it is hard not to wish that a great many more people in the financial world had followed those same rules. Above all, we must regret that the appetite for making money from ‘handling risk in scale in the securities markets’ – piling on the leverage and trading at the highest possible frequencies – supplanted Warburg’s passionate attention to the psychological factor in financial relationships.

 

Yesterday I finished reading “High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg” by Niall Ferguson.

 

Highly recommended!

 

giofranchi

 

[Liberty]

Thanks for the recommendation. The hardcover is incredibly cheap on amazon.com (but not .ca) for some reason.