Word: goldsmithing
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This week's subject is Sir James Goldsmith, the international financier, art collector and company collector who presciently sold most of his stock holdings shortly before last month's market crash. Senior Correspondent Frederick Ungeheuer interviewed Goldsmith at length for the three-page story. The two discovered something they had in common: Frankfurt, Ungeheuer's hometown and the seat of Goldsmith's forebears, a distinguished German banking family. Ungeheuer spent a week traveling with Sir James, watching him conduct business in Paris, New York City and Washington. The two also huddled at Goldsmith's homes in Paris and New York...
...Goldsmith's eye for the future fascinated Senior Writer Otto Friedrich, who wrote this week's Profile. Says he: "Goldsmith is an extraordinary gambler who knows when to hold them and when to fold them. He also has a lot of luck. All great generals and politicians have that kind of luck...
Luck, be a lady tonight. When Jimmy Goldsmith's first son was about to be born, in 1959, he insisted on getting a private room at the best clinic in Paris, even though he didn't have any money to pay for it. Then he went to the Travellers Club on the Champs Elysees and found a rich man whom he could entice into a game of backgammon. "He finally got me out of the clinic," says Ginette Goldsmith, whom Goldsmith married four years later, "with his winnings from that game of backgammon...
Their son Manes is 28 now, working in Mexico City for the Mexican national football team, and Jimmy Goldsmith, officially Sir James Goldsmith, is not exactly penniless anymore. His net worth is estimated to be more than $1.2 billion, including holdings ranging from the Grand Union grocery chain to a publishing house in Paris to some oil wells in Guatemala to about 2.5 million acres of rich timberland in Washington, Oregon and Louisiana. And because he liquidated most of his French and British holdings in recent months -- "I've got my bundle," he likes to say in these postcrash days...
...lira dropped during much of the 1970s, while the West German mark and other Continental currencies rose. Yet at the end of the decade West Germany was enjoying a massive trade surplus and manageable inflation. Britain and Italy, meanwhile, languished under trade deficits and double-digit inflation. Sir James Goldsmith, the British financier, witnessed the process firsthand. Warns he: "Like drugs, devaluation gives you a breather, a small kick. Then it becomes an inflationary merry-go-round to , hell." Only when Britain began pumping large amounts of North Sea oil in the late 1970s did its fortunes improve...