International Bankers

Big as the names of the late Paul and Felix Warburg bulked in U. S. finance, few knew that two other Warburg brothers played big roles in finance, that Max and Fritz Warburg, along with Max's son Erich, ran M. M. Warburg & Co. of Hamburg, Germany. For five years this rich banking firm, founded in 1797, and having an affiliate in Amsterdam, escaped Nazi persecution of Jews. Last week the ax finally fell: M. M. Warburg & Co. was, converted into a limited company under the same name. Officers will be representatives of Berliner Handels-Gesellschaft and other big German banks; Max, Fritz and Erich Warburg will not be among them.

Another international banker is James Speyer, who has as broad a German accent as though he had just arrived from Frankfurt-am-Main, where Speyers have been bankers since the 18th Century. Actually he was born in Manhattan. His interest in Manhattan history is institutionalized in the Museum of the City of New York, to which he gave $450,000. John D. Rockefeller Jr. gave the same. Persistent at the time was a story that Mr. Rockefeller wanted to give more but Mr. Speyer preferred that no gift be bigger than his. Speyer & Co. rarely has taken part in any syndicate of which it was not the biggest member. Its Pine Street building in Manhattan, copied after Raphael's Palazzo Pandolnni in Florence, is occupied by Speyer & Co. alone.

Speyer & Co. was founded in Manhattan in 1837. Its reputation grew as it sold U. S. securities in Germany during the Civil War, as it handled railroad reorganizations, as it floated the first loan to-Cuba. In 1885, James Speyer, after being bound apprentice to the family firms in Paris, London, Frankfurt, went to the U. S. firm. For at least the past 30 years he has run it in an arbitrary, single-minded fashion. He floated a vast amount of foreign loans, financed railroads, built power plants in Manila and a railroad in Bolivia. But the War upset the applecart of international finance. In 1922 Speyer's London firm dissolved; in 1934 the Lazard Speyer-Ellissen banks in Berlin and Frankfurt dissolved. Speyer & Co. also had its troubles in the U. S. Its share in foreign loans dwindled; its patronage of the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway Co. was profitable but it attracted the unfavorable attention of the ICC. Last week James Speyer, now 76, decided to retire.

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