A Banker's Journey: How Edmond J. Safra Built a Global Financial Empire Hardcover – August 30, 2022

I wish I had met him.

All good

Been waiting fir a book in this man!

Loved the story about this philanthropist and banker. Very good printing and material.

Thanks

Yeah, everybody seemed to love the guy not least of all this author, but I cannot say I am on board. He slipped into a niche of facilitating and exploiting the phenomenon of global flight capital quite well. As an outsider he helped other outsiders for fun and profit. Much of the latter. It helps that Safra's exploits were largely at the cost of unsympathetic regimes whose graft was sufficiently incomplete to prevent the kinds of leakage that benefitted Safra's clients and family. Others did this, too, although perhaps not so effectively. In a sense, Safra and others plying the same seams were creatures of the second half of the twentieth century, a time unlike any before or likely any after, when it comes to capital formation and accumulation. The book never quite puts its finger on whether Mr. Safra was an adroit exploiter of the situations at hand or if he had some Special Sauce to do what he did or even if he had some God's-eye view of the Big Picture to get this right. The book's title suffers a bit from hyperbole implying the existence some over-arching Global Financial Empire that simiply does not exist and did not even survive much beyond Mr. Safra's demise, if it ever did. This was always just a one-man show. But that takes a certain talent to be sure and it is good, I suppose, to have it acknowledged.

In the extraordinary life of Edmond Safra, we see the wanderings of the Syro-Lebanese Jewish community in the 20th century. From the streets of Aleppo and Beirut to the board meetings in Geneva and New York and the tragic events in Monaco, Daniel Gross captivates us with the story of a remarkable man, that will remain as an example and a source of inspiration for generations to come.

People around the world know the name Edmond Safra, but his story was never told, and I'm so glad a writer of Daniel Gross's talent finally did it. It's an exceptional book.