The Merchant Bankers
| Author | Joseph Wechsberg; foreword by Christopher Kobrak |
|---|---|
| Published | 1966 |
| Format | Book |
TL;DR — Joseph Wechsberg’s 1966 portraits of the great private and merchant banking houses — Rothschild, Warburg, Lehman, Hambro and others — and the people who ran them.
First published by Little, Brown in 1966; this copy is the 2014 Dover republication, with a new foreword by the business historian Christopher Kobrak.
Wechsberg, a journalist and New Yorker writer, profiles the leading houses of the era through mostly short, anecdotal biographies: the Rothschilds, the Warburgs (with particular attention to Siegmund Warburg in London), Lehman Brothers, Hambros, Deutsche Bank’s Hermann Josef Abs, Italy’s Mediobanca and others. Kobrak’s foreword places the book in the stable Bretton Woods era before the 1970s and notes how many of the firms described no longer exist.
What it is: a popular history and set of profiles by a well-known journalist, from an in-print reprint.
Where this came from
- A copy saved in October 2026.
246 pages. A PDF copy is held in Kyle’s private archive; it is not linked or shared here.