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

Length: 4 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's summary

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

Not My Cup of Tea - Dry Subject Matter

I'm not interested in the history of banking. I got this book on a lark because I was bored. I used it to help me go to bed at night. The calm narration and mildly interesting storyline did the trick. For someone genuinely interested in the subject matter I could see the humor and narrative format being very appealing.

A look at major transitions in banking

Ron Chernow is one of the great historians of banking and finance, and this is a look at one of the great transitions in that history: the death of what was for a long time the dominant kind of banking, the fall of the great financial dynasties.

Many of those dynasties were born originally as merchant families. Successful merchant families tended to accumulate capital, and they had to do something with that capital--and rulers wanted money to field armies and live in a style befitting rulers, without raising taxes to the point that their subjects rebel.

Lending money to other businesses took longer.

Over time, the relationships among bankers, businesses, and investors changed, with the relative power of each rising and falling over time and changing economic realities.

In the nineteenth century, bankers were at the height of their power.

By the time Chernow wrote this book, in the late 1990s, investment bankers, though wealthy and influential, had fallen dramatically compared to both major corporations, and the small investor.

I had initially not noticed the original publication date on this book, and was surprised as I gradually realized that Chernow seemed not just to be not discussing events of the last decade, but seemed to be unaware of them. Then I checked, and realized that, why, yes, he didn't know about the events of the last decade, because the book was written twenty years ago.

It's good. It's thoughtful. It's interesting.

But if you're looking for history and analysis that includes the financial industry events that have disrupted our lives over the last decade, you'll need to look for a more recent book.

With that caveat, recommended.

I bought this audiobook.

Not an easy read

This book contains three sections. The first, The Death of the Banker, is about the rise and fall of the investment banker as the economy changed from a state where most investment money was in the hands of relatively few individuals to the current state where money is now in the hands of mutual funds, pension funds and the stock market, mostly generated by small investors. I think that the subject should have been interesting but I personally found it to be largely stale and uninteresting and that surprises me as I had not thought that anything Ron Chernow wrote would be uninteresting.

The last two sections are brief bios of J. Pierpont Morgan and the Warburg family and after wading through the ups and downs of investment banking, they were a very pleasant change. Unfortunately they were way too brief and I suspect I may want to look into the biographies they represent.

The narration was quite good, but unless the reader has a thorough understanding of how financial instruments like trusts work, the material can be difficult to fully understand. I lack that background, but I did find much of the material interesting as a guide to how our economy has changed over the years and why men like J. Pierpont Morgan were as important as they were, but it can be tough going.

Dated

The narrative is dated to the book’s publication in the late 1990s. The author ventures deep into his opinions and speculation on the future of banking, much of which turned out to be wrong. A nice quick history of traditional banking’s decline, though.

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.

Different Than my Usual

This book is on a different subject than my normal audible choices. However, I really enjoyed it. The author included many personal historical details of the people covered in the book. I didn't that expect in a book about finance. This was a more rounded approach to the subject matter.

Overarching Overview of Banking Biographies

A good read all on its own, this work provides a primer for understanding the world of modern finance. It also provides a perspective to make greater sense of Ron Chernow's other works.

Recommended for all who want an understanding of how our current financial systems came to be.