Paul Warburg
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Paul Moritz Warburg (August 10, 1868 — January 24, 1932) was a German-American banker and early advocate of the U.S Federal Reserve system.
Warburg was born into a successful Jewish banking family in Hamburg, Germany. He and his brothers Max Warburg and Felix Warburg were partners in the family firm of M.M.Warburg & CO, but while Max remained in Germany as head of that business, Felix and Paul moved to New York City in 1901, where they purchased partnerships in the investment firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., where at the time, the influential Jacob Schiff was senior partner.
Paul Warburg became known as a persuasive advocate of central banking in America, in 1907 publishing "Defects and Needs of Our Banking System" in the New York Times and "A Plan for A Modified Central Bank". His efforts were successful in 1913 with the founding of the United States' Federal Reserve, to which he was appointed a member of the first Federal Reserve Board by President Woodrow Wilson.
In 1919 he founded and became first chairman of the American Acceptance Council. He became a director of the Council on Foreign Relations at its founding in 1921, remaining on the board until 1932.
In 1921, he organized and became first chairman of the International Acceptance Bank of New York, then the world's largest acceptance bank. In 1929, International Acceptance was acquired by Bank of Manhattan, with Warburg becoming chairman of the combined organization.
The cartoon character, "Daddy" Oliver Warbucks in the Little Orphan Annie series, was purportedly inspired by the life and times of Paul Warburg. The Paul M. Warburg chair in Economics at Harvard University was named in his honour, a title which is currently held by Professor Robert J. Barro.
His son James was a financial adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt in the first years of his presidency.
[edit] References
- Birmingham, Stephen. Our Crowd. Pocket Books, 1977
- Chernow, Ron. The Warburgs. Random House, 1993
- Collins, Theresa M. Otto. Kahn - Art, Money & Modern Time. The University of North Carolina Press, 2002
- Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Kuhn, Loeb & Co. A Century of Investment Banking. New York: privately printed, 1967
- Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Kuhn Loeb & Co. Investment Banking Through Four Generations. privately printed, 1955
- Warburg, Paul M. The Federal Reserve System. The Macmillan Company, 1930.
[edit] See also
- Warburg
- Warburg family
- Council on Foreign Relations
- History of central banking in the United States
- Kuhn, Loeb & Co.
