The Merchant Bankers

Joseph Wechsberg, a longtime correspondent for the New Yorker, profiles seven great banking houses and the people behind them: Hambros, Barings, the Rothschilds, the Warburgs, Lehman Brothers, Hermann Josef Abs of Deutsche Bank, and Raffaele Mattioli of Banca Commerciale Italiana. He describes Barings as the oldest British banking dynasty and the Warburgs as a German family of Venetian origin going back to the sixteenth century, and portrays the men who led these houses, setting the cloistered aristocracy of Old World banking against the high-stakes investors of Wall Street. A later Dover edition adds a foreword by business historian Christopher Kobrak.

David Senra covered it in episode 425 of his Founders podcast.