The Death of the Banker

The Decline and Fall of the Great Financial Dynasties and the Triumph of the Small Investor

By: Ron Chernow

Narrated by: Michael Kramer

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 20th 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 20th-century finance and a guide to the new era of giant mutual funds on Wall Street.

©1997 Ron Chernow (P)2017 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

A small but effective book

Chernow combines a speech and essays to trace the death of the banker. It is amazing to see how J P Morgan and the Warburg family used relational banking to rise to such storied heights but then to see it all melt away whether by regulation or conglomerate takeover. Larger than life characters. A wonderful synopsis of banking and historical context.

A bit out of date

The book itself was well-written, typical Ron Chernow's work, but it's getting a bit too old to recommend it. Quite a bit of the information on regulations are long out of date, but it was a surprisingly good listen.

Note copyright/printing date

It's difficult to really get to the heart of changing American finance without a telling of the 2006 mortgage crisis. Up through the mid-1990s, this book does a thorough and often fascinating job of telling the story.

Excellent

Great explanation of how banking has changed. Full of colorful characters too. Many you’ve never heard of before.

Big Picture? Got it. Details? Not So Much.

One of the great advantages of audiobooks is that they can get you through passages that would otherwise prompt you (or at least me) to quietly give up on the printed text. The tangle of rigging and navigation in the Aubrey-Maturin novels, for example. Or that excruciating catalogue of late medieval Parisian architecture in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. But the financial terminology in The Death of the Banker is another matter.

I get the broad outlines of Chernow's thesis, and the handy bar graph he creates to illustrate it is so simple, even I can imagine it without the help of a picture on a page. But Chernow's familiarity with financial concepts leaves us (ok, me) panting to catch up. Without a helpful explanation--like those provided in his magnificent Hamilton bio--I can't tell a "securities market" from a "commercial paper market". Given time, I can noodle out what he means by "the financial allocation function", but by then, the story has moved on and I need to (once again) rewind.

Still, I get the overall concept: industries once tethered to their bankers have now been liberated by (and made beholden to) small investors like you and me. Chernow makes it clear that, like all triumphs, that of the small investor has its downsides, too. The obliteration, for example, of true "relationship banking", when men who knew and trusted each other whispered advice in paneled libraries. Yes, you'd have to be of a certain financial standing to enjoy that level of attention. But it's better than the faux-intimacy banks (along with most other brands) foist on us wholesale nowadays.

After the long introductory essay, "Tycoons", comes as a welcome change. Here Chernow presents two brief studies of J. Pierpont Morgan and the Warburg dynasty. As with philosophical and political ideas, I have a much easier time grasping financial principles if I can see them acted out in history. So, with all my shortcomings as an audience, I still managed to learn something.

Michael Kramer does a fine job with all of it. Like all good narrators, he sounds interested in what he's reading and wants to make it interesting for us. Alas, his efforts behind the mic are somewhat marred by a sibilance that the "Small Speakers" setting on my iPod (yes, I still use an iPod) almost succeeded in banishing.