City Cinderella: The Life And Times Of Mercury Asset Management

by PeterStormonthDarling (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1999

  $23.98

  In 1979 Peter Stormonth Darling was appointed chairman of Warburg Investment Management and told by his boss, the legendary banker Siegmund Warburg, 'Your first task, Peter, is to get rid of it. I don't care what you get for it. You can give it away.' Fortunately, no one wanted it. Renamed Mercury Asset Management it was to grow spectacularly over the next twenty years to become - under Peter Stormonth Darling's chairmanship - the largest and most successful investment fund in British financial history. When MAM' was sold in 1998 to Merrill Lynch, it fetched four times as much as the mighty Warburgs Bank itself when it was sold to the Swiss Bank Corporation in 1995. This is the inside story of someone who, as a director from its first day in 1969 until its last as an independent company in 1998, and chairman from 1979 to 1997, had an unrivalled front seat throughout. This candid and amusing memoir is full of colourful characters and anecdotes about the great and not-so-good in the City, Wall Street and elsewhere. Central to the story of course is Siegmund Warburg who built from scratch in one generation, London's most successful and most feared merchant bank. The author is frank about the mixture of work, opportunism and sheer good fortune involved in Mercury's success - and forthright also about the sudden, panicky sale of Warburgs in 1995 and the bank's rapid deterioration since then.