YouSaid · the spoken record

Nathan Rothschild

lines on the record: 92
first: 2021-08-18
most recent: 2021-08-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“A formidable individual. They call their brother the commanding general, which I get to in a minute. But anyways, Michael saying to his older brother, Fredo, and the same thing, they were in a meeting. Fredo made the mistake of speaking up and taking sides, speaking up in a meeting and not acting in the best interest of family. And so Michael says to Fredo, he's like, listen, Fredo, you're my older brother and I love you, but don't ever take sides with anyone against a family again. And then he has like a pause for a second or two and he says ever. And we see a similar thing with Salmon Rosschild saying here. It's established rule with us. We're not going to rebuke or express any kind of public rebuke about the conduct of anybody else on that same page. There's another quote from Salmon Russia. He says, my brother in London is the commanding general and I am the field marshal.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's like played out over and over again in different points in history, different cultures, you know, it's a funny thing that came to mind as I'm reading this and just it's constantly reminded to you how important it was to the Rothschild. It reminds me of some of my favorite movies, The Godfather One and Godfather 2. So in Godfather One, you have Don Corleone played by Marlon Brando. He's telling his son Santino after a meeting. They're in a meeting with somebody else. And Santino makes a mistake of speaking up when he should be quiet. And so after the meeting, he grabs him and he says, never tell anyone outside the family what you're thinking. That could easily have been said by not only Meyer Rosschild, but any of his sons. And then Godfather too, Michael, who's now taken over for his father, says to his older brother. So think about Michael Corleone, even though he wasn't the older brother. Like, this is not like a typical monarchy where succession just flows to by age. It goes by who's”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our Father who united in himself boundless integrity, the deepest of insights, the wisdom of experience, and the pious habits of a sage is who we owe not only our wealth, but also our honorable position in society too. I therefore request most urgently that you will always take care to implant in your heirs the same consciousness of concord and togetherness so that the same spirit of unity and cooperation continues to exist for as long as it is possible. To do so will be of benefit both to you and your descendants. It will prevent our business interests from being split up and will stop others benefiting from our great efforts, our knowledge, and the experience we have laboriously accumulated over many years. So this constant emphasis on unity, the fact that it's the family, it's us versus them, the family versus the world.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you can't make yourself loved, make yourself feared. Of all these pieces of business advice the one most frequently cited was on the importance of cultivating politicians. You know, dear Nathan, what father used to say about sticking to a man in government. You remember father's principle that you have to be ready to try everything to get in with such a great government figure, and so not only would they communicate about their father's wishes amongst them, the five brothers, but they would also educate the future generations on the importance of unity, which again is seen as their most important first and holiest of duties is the way they refer to it. Nearly 30 years after their father's death, his eldest son would be moved to remind all the other partners, including those that had never even met their grandfather, of the same all important nexus between unity and success. Unity was what our blessed father, with his last words, enjoined me to uphold as our first and holy”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“but the sons of Meyer meant what they said time and time again in the years after his death they hark back to their father's words, to his business aphorisms, his paternal commandments to them, his male descendants. A typical examples Amschel's request for better stock market information from Nathan. Father used to say, a banker has to calculate there is no merit in making transactions in the dark. Other maxims related more to the firm's relations with the government. Nowadays everybody calls himself excellency. I remember, however, what our father used to say. With money, you become an excellency. The key to was to establish some kind of financial leverage, as Amschel put it, it is better to deal with a government in difficulties than with one that has luck on its side. We heard this from our father. Another example James remembered a tip that he would often put into practice in his relationship with rival firms. Father used to say”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fortunate at the time, Napoleon winds up deciding, hey, I'm going to take over your lands. He flees in exile. And then that's the opening. They get to enter into the world of finance because now they have access and they're managing one of the largest fortunes in Europe. And that's a direct result of Napoleon wanting basically deposing Wilhelm. Okay, so I want to get into the Rothschilds after Meyer dies. And this is a little bit about that, some business maxims that they would repeat for many decades after their father's death. Meyer's influence on his descendants was profound and enduring. Four days after their father's death, his son sent out a circular to their most valued clients to reassure that there would be no change in the conduct of the family business. His memory will never fade among us. Our blessed father remains unforgettable to us. Such pious sentiments are not always translated into practice once the first pain of bereavement has passed.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And eventually he's going to use this same network to get gold and other financial instruments that can actually fund wars going on in Europe. This is merely a stepping stone for now. Nathan had made up his mind to become a fully fledged banker. He had traveled a long way since leaving behind the cramped confines of the ghetto, and the discrimination symbolized by the Jew statutes that's at law that restricts what Jewish people can do, where they can go, how they can act. Just 12 years before. So basically he's making the point. It's like that's a hell of a jump just in 12 years.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Later on, they refer to him as the Napoleon of Finance. And it says, Nathan felt himself almost at war with his business rivals So it was around this time he also had an opportunity presented because there was a restriction on trade from England during the Napoleonic period that winds up creating this opportunity for large profits. And so this is what I was referencing earlier. We get to the point where he comes from, he transitions from a pirate to a banker. Under these circumstances, Nathan therefore had little option but to carry on his export business illegally. He became a smuggler. He was sending a consignment to give some examples of what he was doing. He was sending a consignment of coffee to Sweden via Amsterdam using an American registered ship and fake Dutch documents. Such shipments could not legally be insured so that the risk involved were very substantial, but so were the potential rewards. Nathan had earned a reputation as a man who regularly succeeded in getting goods to the continent. So right now he's smuggling like his own wares to be resold on the continent.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amounts on his own attention on the various credit transactions generated by his business. He constantly shopped around for better borrowing and bill discounting facilities dealing with a succession of London bankers. Like his father, he was gradually shifting from being a merchant to being a merchant banker. He goes into the personality type and that he was well suited for this business. The frantic, hustling atmosphere of these formative years is vividly captured in the letters of Nathan's which have survived. In a market crowded with numerous small businesses subject to rapid fluctuation in prices and interest rates, and almost completely unregulated, it took a combination of burning aggression and cool calculation to survive and thrive. Nathan possessed both of those traits in abundance.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In his letters to potential buyers, Nathan constantly stressed that his markup as a middleman was lower than those charged by his competitors. So lower prices, more customers, more favorable repayment terms for his customers, more customers. The more Nathan could pay in cash, the less he had to pay his suppliers on a percentage basis, but he had to give, here's the problem. He pays his money up front and then he waits for his money for many, many more months longer than his competitors. The more credit he could give his customers, the more customers he attracted. This seems to have been his fundamental principle. So that's his formula for running this business. Here's the problem. It's not even a problem. I mean, it is kind of scary, especially if those customers go out of business or whatever the case is. But this is going to lead him into finance as well. So it winds up being obviously really positive. The practical implications of his system were nerve-wracking. It was very easy to get commissions, but not quite as easy to get paid for them. So Nathan began to concentrate increasingly.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In case I got into trouble, just like their father did, but they always made sure they were up to date. This is more about Nathan. So, you know, he leaves Frankfurt at an early age, lands in England. And at this point in his career, he's just running their cloth exporting business from Manchester. And we see that he copies a lot of what his father did in finance back in Frankfurt and applied it to his cloth business. So it says actually my note. Like his father, Nathan optimized for volume over margin. He would pay cash to his own suppliers up front so he could get a 15 or 20% discount, but then would extend to his customers longer repayment periods to increase the amount of customers he has. So it says at a time when profit margins in the textile industry could be as high as 20%, Nathan charged a modest 5 to 9%. This was a deliberate ploy to attract customers and increases market share.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're just making the problem bigger for yourself. You're focusing on enlarging the business instead of actually knowing how your business is doing. Really is necessary that you keep a precise record of every single transaction. The merchants who are well organized are the ones who get very rich, and the ones who are disorganized are the ones who go broke. So the mistake Nathan makes, again, this is like a decade, maybe a decade and a half after his father's telling him this. So he knows that he should do this. At one point, there's so much turmoil. They're invested in so many different things. They have no idea where their money is. And so there's all these letters going back and forth between different, the brothers are spread on five different cities. And they're like, hey, where's the money? I don't have any money over here. Do you have the money? Where's it at? And they had such poor record keeping. They wind up having to do almost like a forensic accounting to figure out, okay, and actually locate the money for a while. They're just like, are we broke? And after that, they always made sure that their books and I'm sure they had multiple versions of the books.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and concentrate Nathan did. He did not have any interest outside of the family and business. Business was his God. It took up all his time. Nathan was fiercely ambitious and competitive man, quick to take offense as to give it for his business dealings. Initially, now this is his father still alive at this point, initially Nathan took his orders from Frankfurt. That's his father. So there's a bunch of letters in here where we have left over from his father talking to Nathan about this. But I'm just going to, some of this I have repeated in the last podcast because I didn't make the connection either until I read this book where it's not good enough to know something. You actually have to apply it. And Nathan did not heed his father's advice until he wasn't making a massive mistake that could have ruined the entire family. So his father's saying, hey, you're completely disorganized. Like, get your books and orders. You got to follow the money to the last cent, right? The more you sell, the worse it will get if you aren't organized.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're limited to for Jewish people. And so it says by the later 18th century, it was Jews who had to come to be seen as the most enterprising operators when it came to money changing and all kinds of lending. At a time when most fields of economic activity were close to them, Jews had little alternative but to concentrate, that's the most important word in this entire section. They had little alternative but to concentrate on commerce and finance.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To know how they thought. So let's go back to this description of the letters that do survive, talks about their correspondence as a uniquely direct and intimate quality. The partners are frank, sometimes even abusive with another, and made no secret of their opinions of the monarchs and ministers they had to deal with, which was rarely flattering. They had a disdain, especially Nathan had a disdain for the people he was working with, for the aristocracy in large part. And it might be because he's got a giant ego. He probably thinks he's much more like talented and smarter than they are. The contrast could hardly be greater with the formal functional business letters they addressed to political friends and business associates outside the family. The Rothschild letters reveal a reality which is in many ways way more fascinating than even the most fantastic myth. Okay, so I want to go to this question. Why did they excel in this field? And part of it has to do not with a lot of fields at this time, a lot of like jobs or occupations you could go into.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, we're destroyed at the orders of the senior partners. We therefore have precious few letters by Nathan compared with the thousands from his brothers which have survived And so that's why there is, I mean, this is an extremely extensive book. It's like 500 pages unbelievably detailed. But there is surprisingly little known about how they made their money, how much money they have, because they optimized for secrecy and privacy, and they destroyed records. There's just large gaps. So that's why we're left with conjecture. But let's look at this from a human nature perspective, what we know about when you study history, you see that regardless of time and place, when you expose humans to similar stimuli, they act in remarkably similar ways, right? And so think about this. London made the most money, and yet all the copies of the outgoing letters from London were ordered to be destroyed. So therefore, that tells you you have a massive, massive gap what we can ever hope to understand about them. So as I'm reading the book, what I'm hoping to learn, I'm not trying to recreate exactly how they made their money.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so he's talking about up until this point, you know, a lot of stuff written about them has been either conspiracy theory, myth, truth covered with a bunch of other lies. And his point is like, you know, well, let me just read it. There is, however, a further explanation for this relative lack of scholarship, and that is the intractability of so much of the material. There is a vast amount of it. We Rothschilds are inveterate scribblers and cannot live without letter writing and letter receiving. So when I read that, I'm like, well, that kind of conflicts. Like, what are you talking about? You're saying, okay, that you have a lot of letters, right? Because they wrote letters counseling. That's how they communicated. But a lot of it can't be reconstructed. And so we know from the last book that Rochelle is optimized for secrecy and privacy. And so he cleans this up here. He's like, okay, all the copies, so there's a lot of letters, but all the copies of the outgoing letters from the London partners from Nathan.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That talks about the utility, like the time utility in a lot of books, like you can still learn from something that's over 20 years old. Part of the purpose of this book is to supplant Rothschild mythology with historical reality, insofar as that can be reconstructed from surviving documentary evidence.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I love how they made the connection there. Let me continue the next paragraph that says not only had the Rothschilds replaced the old aristocracy, they also represented a new materialist religion. Money is the god of our time, and Rothschild is his prophet. And I just want to point out similarity too that I noticed, that everybody referred to them not as the Rothschilds, even though they are written about sometimes in the family unit, but they use the singular Rothschild to describe the patriarch at the time. That's what they would call Meyer. They wouldn't call him Meyer. They call him Rothschild. And now Nathan, this is who the quote was just about, they call him Rothschild, just like his father. This is the opportunity that the author, we're still in the introduction, this long-ass introduction, the opportunity that the author is pursuing with this book. And again, this book is, I think it was published first time in 1998. And even though we've done older books by means, but I just love the idea.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So what he's talking about there is before all the wealth was held by land, by noble title, by these kind of monarchies of all sides, some powerful, some not. But when you invent an entire new asset class, it's not the same as the asset class that produce most of the wealth in your time. You enable meteor social mobility. So now you have private families that are richer than entire countries. And I never made the connection on my own until I read that, that one byproduct, one unexpected byproduct of that is now that the people, these monarchs, have less power. And if you look at how much how many of these monarchies over the next 200 years turned into democracies or some version of that, you can look back and say, okay, well, what started that? And so his sentence, he's like, I see in Rothschild one of the greatest revolutionaries who have founded modern democracy. That completely went over my head in the last book. That is a mind-blowing thought.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm still in the introduction, but this really helped crystallize my understanding of the role that the Rothschilds played. And I never thought of it in the last book. Like Rothschilds as revolutionaries, right? So they're describing what the effect, their contemporaries are describing what the effect of the Rothschild's growing this international finance market, how that changed the entire society. I see in Rothschild, so they're talking about Nathan Rothschild. I see in Rothschild as one of the greatest revolutionaries who have founded modern democracy. That's a hell of a statement. What does he mean by that? Rothschild destroyed the predominance of land by raising the system of state bonds to supreme power, thereby mobilizing property and income, and at the same time endowing money with the previous privileges of the land.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These estates and these castles, and just this crazy life of luxury. But the five brothers remember that. And so for them in their lifetime, if you think about it, not Meyer misses, he died before this happened. But if you think about it in their lifetime, they go from being growing up in a prison like ghetto to being nobles. And so this is also when they're made noble, you see by their choice of the coat of arms for their family, what's important to them, the notion of perfect fraternal harmony was inspired by the brothers themselves. When they submitted a design for a coat of arms following their enoblement by the Austrian emperor. So part of this depicted one arm bearing five arrows, the symbol of the unity of the five brothers.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one of the, I would say the most important ideal to the Rothschilds was unity. This was laid out by Meyer. It's what he talked about on his deathbed. He talked about it for years before he died. Later on, his descendants call Unity, the unity of the family, starting with the five brothers, the first and holiest of their duties. So it says, success in all great transactions depend on the application of the consciously adopted and fundamental maxims. These maxims come from the Father. One of these principles obliged that the five brothers are to conduct their combined business in an uninterrupted community of interest. The notion of perfect fraternal harmony was inspired by the brothers themselves and they think about how crazy in two generations they go from being so poor. They're in like, you know, you grew up in a ghetto. And the five brothers was interesting to me is, you know, the five brothers, they grew up in the ghetto too. Their descendants grew up.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he uses the term hard bastard, who's good at killing people for our purposes. It's the formidable individual who's good at making money, who's good at building businesses. Those are the people I'm very interested in reading about and learning from. This is one sentence that tells an entire story. There are few major political figures in 19th century history who do not feature in the index of this book.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it says, you know, Myers set the tone. He's like, this is what I want the family to be. This is how we're going to keep our fortune, how we're going to keep building it. And then later generations did not grow up in the ghetto like he did not have that effort. It says, and the wishes of the individuals who happen to be born Rothschilds, few of whom shared the founder's relentless appetite for work and profit. And so that paragraph made me think of that quote I told you about on the last podcast from Game of Thrones where they're talking about, okay, well, who actually makes families rich? Is it the fancy lads in silk, the descendants? No, it's not. It's the formidable individual. And I want to re-listen to that part. And I'm going to play the clip instead of me re-”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Though due attention is also paid to the many other forms of financial business Rochales did, bullion broking and refining, accepting and discounting commercial bills, direct trading in commodities, foreign exchange dealing and arbitrage, even insurance. The primary concern of this book is therefore to explain the origin and development underline the section of one of the biggest and most unusual businesses in the history of modern capitalism, the biggest but also one of the most unusual business. The history of the firm is inseparable from the history of the family. Inevitably, there were conflicts between the collective ambitions of the family so compellingly spelt out by Meyer before he died and the wishes of the individuals who happened to be born Rothschilds, and this is the most important part of this section why I started to lose interest as I got deeper into the down the family line away from people like Meyer and Nathan.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To lay fiber optic cable, if I remember correctly, this has been probably, I don't know, maybe eight, ten years, something like that since I read the book. But they spent an inordinate amount of money digging up the earth and laying down cable so they can actually front run orders and act on information faster than the people that don't have that information. And it's all trading information. But what was interesting is in the Ross Halls day, they might have a day in advance or maybe two days in advance that they know more than other people and they can do a lot of, they can obviously profit a lot in that short amount of time period. In the book Flashbook Flashboys, you're talking about that that's been reduced down to like milliseconds, but it's fundamentally the same idea that the Rothschild had, that if I can get this information quicker, I can profit from it. These are other lines of business the Rothschilds were involved in. This has got to be the longest introduction of any book that I've ever read. It's like over 30 pages. At the core of this book, then is the International Bond Market, which the Rothschilds did so much to develop.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To each other, and then in the other book, I was going to do a three-part series, but I'm only going to do this is the last book on the Ross I'm going to do. Because the further we get away from Nathan's death, the less interested, because it terms from a monarchy, like this formidable individual leading the family, to more like a committee structure, which I'm generally not interested in. But the other book, that book, the sequel to the book I hold in my hand, talks about this, like they wind up losing. with the invention of things like the telegraph railroads start to be able to move people and information around faster and say they lose this edge this this this value of speed or this edge of speed and good information they have they actually it diminishes with the invention of more technology in the future and what i found also interesting is when i got to the section i read a book a long time ago by michael lewis called the flashboys and in that book you have private investors and private companies actually spending hundreds of millions of dollars”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maintaining the best possible relations with the leading political figures of the day. They carefully developed a network of agents and other key financial markets whose job it was to keep them supplied with the latest financial and political news, and they constantly strove to accelerate the speed with which information could be relayed from their agents to them. From an early stage they relied on their own system of courier, say the private information network is the way you could think about this. From an early stage, they relied on their own system of couriers and relished their ability to obtain political news ahead of the European diplomatic services. So way to think about that section is, hey, if I get information, if I have information before you do, right, I can act on that and I can profit from that. And so they would have this private network. They were rumored to have really advanced homing pigeons that they would be able to send messages really rapidly.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As the desire we have today. I guess that's the point I'm making there. And that's what popped my mind as I'm reading this section. So it says, okay, so it's capable of suffering large capital losses. What determine the ups and downs of the 19th century bond market? The answer to this question is central to any understanding of the history of the Rothschild Bank. The most important factor was political confidence. The confidence of investors, and especially in big market making investors like the Rothschilds, in the ability of the bond issuing states to continue to meet their obligations. That is, to continue to pay interest on their bonds. So the most important factor is confidence and political confidence. You have to know the state of that confidence. And so that's why the Rothschilds put a huge value on good information and speed and moving quickly. This explains the importance they were all the Ross always attached to having up-to-date political and economic news. The Rothschild spent so much time, energy, and money.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Outrageous, but he gives us in one of those books Orthodox gives us a history Arthur Rock rather gives us a history of the industry that he's trying to help pioneer. He talks about it wasn't called venture capital back then. It used to be called adventure capital and most of that was coming from like these huge estates of these robber barons like the Whitneys, the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts and so on and so forth. But my point being here is like I really try to think of things as like a metaphor for things that are happening in the past for a metaphor of what's happening today. Like in the Rosshild's day, it's brand new, the international bond market was not sophisticated. It was very tiny compared to how big it got in the future. In our day, maybe that's venture capital, maybe it's crypto, maybe it's other private investments in private companies. But the desire, the human desire to seek out investments that hopefully with the hope of a return on that investment sometime in the future is constant. It's the same desire the Rothschilds had here in the late 1800s late 1700s to mid-1800s.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investing. And obviously they're doing that because they hope the assets increase in price. And shrewd enough to appreciate the advantages of such assets compared with traditional forms of holding wealth. And so when I was reading this section, I was like, okay, bonds, these international bonds are new at this point. As I go through and I'm reading the history of entrepreneurship, if you think of that's what we're doing is we're reading all these biographies and all the asset, the new asset classes that are constantly invented over time. This is very similar to the venture asset class that is exploding in size and popularity in our time now. Because if you go back and look at like how hard was it for Bob Noyce to get funding to leave Shockley semiconductor to start his own company? He wound up teaming up, if you remember these podcasts I did on that. He winds up teaming up with Arthur Rock, one of the first venture capitalists who I'm still looking for a biography, by the way, because he winds up funding Fairchild, Intel, Apple, Teledyne. I mean, the guy's careers are...”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“fixed interest bonds. The significance of this system for nineteenth century history cannot be overemphasized, and he tells us why, for this growing international bond market brought together Europe's true capitalists, and they put capitalists in quotation marks, and he defines that as the elite of people wealthy enough to be able to tie up money in such assets and shrewd enough to appreciate the advantages of such assets as compared with the traditional forms of holding wealth. So at that point that's mostly land and things like that, bonds were liquid, and they were, of course, capable of accruing large capital gains. Their only disadvantage was that they were also capable of suffering large capital losses. And if you think, if you pause right here and you just think about what's happening in history, this might be relatively new phenomenon. It's a phenomenon that still occurs to this day, but the same people that are interested in...”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or they just massively broadened it. But either way, they played a very important role in building out what is going to be one of the largest industries the world's ever seen. So it says in Britain at the time fiscal retrenchment and monetary stabilization in Britain created a need for new forms of investment for those who had grown accustomed to putting their money in high-yielding British bonds during the war years. It was this need which Nathan and his brothers successfully met. The system they developed enabled British investors and other rich capitalists in Western Europe, so the rich capitalists in Europe, the British investors at this time, this is usually royalty. A lot of this is their money is in land. They call those immovable assets throughout the book. And so Nathan is really the one that's leading this effort into building an entire new asset class that is a lot more mobile and liquid to invest in the debts of those states by purchasing internationally”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I call Meyer. He changes his name and actually changes the spelling. And it's widely believed he did that to further assimilate into the non-Jewish societies that he was doing a lot of business with. So he says they're going from this tiny small merchant bank in Frankfurt and they're exporting cloth exporters in England to running a multinational financial partnership. And it's funny as I was reading about that later in the book. You can really think of Nathan going from a pirate to a banker is the way I would interpreted what the author was telling us. I'll tell you more about this. Right now Neil's just giving us this whole overview of what's occurring in the Rothschild dynasty around this time. And this is the way to think about this because they're like, you know, what did they do from like, how do they have such a fortune? What exactly was their business? First of all, it's a very unusual business, very opaque and very secret, like I said, but you can think of the Rothschilds as inventing the international bond market. And there is some debate over whether they invent”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the supply was so low, he made a ton of money. And so the book says involvement in the management of this huge investment portfolio was one of the first steps Meyer Rothschild took in order to become a banker rather than a mere coin dealer. He was also a merchant as well. And this is another example of right place at the right time because this time period in history, this is from 1793 to 1815 is where we're at the book, was characterized by recurrent warfare. So they have a supply of money they can lend out and they have almost essentially an unlimited demand. It was in this highly volatile context that the Rothschilds made the decisive leap from running two modest firms so they have a small merchant bank that they're running Frankfurt back in Germany and a cloth exporter in Manchester, England that is run by Nathan Rothschild. And Nathan is who I'm going to spend most of the time talking about because he's the second formidable individual in the Rothschild family, the first being, obviously, the founder Meyer.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there was no sophisticated financial markets for which they can borrow easily, says the deficits were not easily financed. National capital markets were not very developed. Borrowing was borrowing was very expensive. And so you read that and you're like, okay, they're going to try to help the finance needs of governments in Europe throughout the time. Well, where are they getting this money from? And so I talked a little bit about this in the last book. But Meyer, Rothschild, winds up managing later on in his life. And this takes several years for him to do, and he does it in like small steps. But he wanted managing one of the largest fortunes in Europe at the time. It's this small German state called Hesse Castle, and it says it was effectively run by its ruler at a profit through the hiring out of his subjects as mercenaries to other states, including he sold, so he sells essentially peasants, like the people that he's in charge of, forcibly to fight in other wars, including the American Revolution. And because the need for soldiers was so high, the demand was so high.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The things we're going to focus on really is the traits and the ideas that the Rothschilds had as opposed to trying to document where a lot of their money came from because they were extremely secretive and we don't actually know that much. So it says to answer these questions properly, it's necessary to understand something of the 19th century public finance. For it was by lending to governments or by speculating in existing government bonds that the Rothschilds made a very large part of their colossal fortune. And so then he goes to describe, Neil Ferguson goes on to describe, like, what is the problem that governments are having at this point that the Rothschilds are presenting their services as a solution to? And he says, all 19 century states occasionally ran budget deficits, meaning their tax revenues were usually insufficient to meet their expenditures. It was war and the preparation for war which generally precipitated the biggest increases in expenditures. So the easiest way to distill this down is governments needed money to kill other humans.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An extract from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is The House of Rothschild, Money Profits from 1798 to 1848, and is written by Neil Ferguson. And this is part two in a series I'm doing on the Rothschilds, the last podcast I did was on the founder, the patriarch of the Rothschild family dynasty. That was Meyer Rothschild. He's also in this book, but I'm going to focus mostly on what happens after he dies, when his third son, Nathan, is actually the one that takes control of the family. So let's go back to this introduction where I was just reading from, where I left off with, you know, the author saying, like, you're trying to make an economic history of capitalism. Like, we have to figure out how the richest family the world's ever seen or what's rumored to be. We really don't actually know what exactly was the business that they did. And so in the introduction, he spends a little bit of time trying to describe this. And a lot of this is just going to remain unknown.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Economic History of Capitalism is therefore incomplete until some attempt has been made to explain how the Rothschilds became so phenomenally rich. What exactly was the business the Rothschilds did?”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The five houses work together so closely that it's impossible to discuss the history of one without discussing the history of all five. They were the component parts of a multinational bank. Unlike modern multinationals, however, this was always a family firm. Perhaps the most important point to grasp about the multinational partnership is that for most of the century, between eighteen fifteen and nineteen fourteen, it was easily the biggest bank in the world. In terms of their combined capital, the Rothschilds were in a league of their own. The twentieth century has no equivalent. Not even the biggest of today's international banking corporations enjoys the relative supremacy enjoyed by the Rothschilds in their heyday, just as no individual today owns a large share of the world's wealth as Nathan Rothschild did as an individual.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All banks have histories. Only the Rothschilds have a mythology. Ever since the second decade of the 19th century, there has been speculation about the origins and extent of the family's wealth, about the social implications of their meteoric upward mobility, about their political influence, not only in the five countries where there were Rothschild houses, but throughout the world.”
2021-08-18 · Founders · #198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source