Word: wechsberg
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...MERCHANT BANKERS by Joseph Wechsberg. 365 pages. Little, Brown...
...this series of essays, New Yorker Correspondent Joseph Wechsberg examines seven of the world's leading merchant or investment bankers. Though he is himself the son and grandson of bankers, Wechsberg ignores a lot of the basics of the business and, with the exception of a chapter on Wall Street's Lehman Brothers, shortchanges the potent U.S. bankers to concentrate on those of London's City. But his stories have a richness of color and some details of remarkable deals that have turned money into factories, jobs and useful products for everybody's compound interest...
...merchant banker's prime asset is his experience in sizing up situations, measuring men and calculating risks down to one sixty-fourth of 1 %. But very often, as Wechsberg notes, he relies on instinct. One day in 1932, Swedish Match King Ivar Kreuger tried to interest the Lehman Brothers in a complicated financial deal. Kreuger talked and talked about his grandiose schemes, while Philip Lehman made a few notes. Then Lehman turned him down: "I have a rule, Mr. Kreuger. If I cannot understand something by reading my notes on the subject...
...Wechsberg's main point is that the merchant bankers nowadays are increasingly branching out of traditional finance to become all-round consultants and father-confessors. Germany's Hermann Abs, for example, is a director of 24 companies. The Lehman bankers, besides sitting on 200 corporate boards, have an investment advisory service handling accounts worth $2 billion. Nobody with less than $500,000 need apply...
...SELF-BETRAYED, by Joseph Wechsberg (301 pp.; Knopf; $3.95). Czech-born Author Wechsberg often patrols the same prose beat as Tyrolean-born Ludwig Bemelmans; on it the major misdemeanors are underdone Wiener Schnitzel and overdone Central European whimsy. Wechsberg strays off his favorite beat in his second novel, a somber, loose-jointed documentary on the rise and fall of a big party wheel in Communist Czechoslovakia. Wechsberg's Communist hero-heel is named Bruno Stern, but his career closely parallels that of the late Rudolf Slansky, powerful, Moscow-trained secretary general of the Czech Communist Party who was purged...