the world of private banking

INtRODUctION
xxv
of philanthropic aid cannot be measured quantitatively, the works of benefactors
such as Baron and Baroness de Hirsch, the Bischoffsheims, and Ernest Cassel shed
light on a major aspect of the socio-cultural dimension of private banking.
More than any other group of private bankers, the merchant bankers of the
City of London were able to rely on the strength of their social assets. Unlike their
counterparts in other major European financial centres, they not only survived
as family firms well until the 1960s, but continued to form, both socially and
professionally, a banking aristocracy in what remained one of the world’s two
leading financial centres. Looking at recent memoirs, David Kynaston suggests, in
the book’s final chapter, that their social profile, based on wealth, family inheritance
and social connections persisted into the four to five decades following the First
World War. He also analyses the complex process of continuity and change in the
leading merchant banks, as the City was gradually transformed by the advent of
the Euromarkets, its invasion by American banks, and ultimately the ‘Big Bang’
of 1986. However, private banking had by then taken a new, different meaning,
private wealth management – an activity requiring social assets reminiscent of
those of the private banker of old.