The Last of the Imperious Rich: Lehman Brothers, 1844-2008.

AuthorMarshall, Jeffrey
PositionBook review

The Last of the Imperious Rich: Lehman Brothers, 1844-2008.

By Peter Chapman. Portfolio, 306 pages. $27.95.

It's important to note what this book doesn't offer: A fly-on-the-wall, day-by-day chronology of the downfall of Lehman Brothers. The famed investment bank's collapse in September 2008 was the seminal event of the financial meltdown that shook the world that fall, and a close look at those few weeks is clearly grist for a book. The last chapter of Peter Chapman's book begins with the devastation of 9/11, so relatively few pages actually analyze what finally took Lehman under.

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What the author has fashioned instead is a carefully researched narrative of the investment bank and its evolution from an Alabama cotton broker to one of the titans of Wall Street. It begins, logically, with the arrival in New York of 22-year-old Henry Lehman, son of an affluent merchant family in Bavaria. Interestingly, two other young Germans emigrated a few years later: Marcus Goldman and Joseph Sachs, whose Goldman Sachs Group has emerged as Wall Street's dominant investment bank.

Chapman, a writer and editor for the Financial Times, scrupulously and lucidly details the company's change and growth over the years. Brothers Emanuel and Mayer Lehman decamped from Alabama after the Civil War and moved to New York, where they helped set up the New York Cotton Exchange in 1870. They joined a rich merchant class and became an integral part of the high society forming among wealthy European-born Jews, often kept at arms' length by the ruling Protestant elite.

The author skillfully weaves the context of American economic history with Lehman's own rise. In the early days of the 20th century, for instance, American industry had a newfound vitality and dynamism, and Lehman began advising on mergers and acquisitions--a business that was to prove spectacularly successful in the decades to come. Lehman also moved...

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