Niall Ferguson.
NIALL FERGUSON
HIGH FINANCIER: THE LIVES AND TIME OF SIEGMUND WARBURG (2010)
Siegmund Warburg (1902-1982) was born into a Jewish German banking family. In 1934 fhe fled from the Nazi regime to London. During the period leading up to the Second World War he worked under cover in Switzerland for the Z Organisation - a highly secret offshoot of MI6. This enabled him to gather intelligence on Nazi banking operations.
In 1946 he set up the highly successful merchant bank S.G.Warburg. His competitors in the City of London had boards stuffed with landed aristocrats, who knew nothing of banking. By contrast Warburg was cosmopolitan, highly intelligent, and extremely knowledgeable about the European banking system. He recruited similar people to his board and the company went from strength to strength. He played a particularly important role in the establishment of the Eurobond market.
The S;pectator wrote of Ferguson’s biography of Warburg: ‘Beautifully paced, dramatically subtle and psychologically shrewd, this is Ferguson at his finest’.
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Niall Ferguson (born 1964) is a British historian who has spent much of his career in the USA. A specialist in economic history, he has written extensively about British and American imperial history. He has also produced severa television series. He has held professorial posts at the London School of Economics, New York Univesity, and Harvard University. He took his undergraduate and PhD degrees at Oxford University, where his PhD dissertation was on German inflation 1914-1924.
