Drenched in It
Eric Baker is an atheist, and if you asked him where his atheism came from, he would not tell you a story about rebellion. He would give you a genealogy. "My grandfather was a liberal academic and my...
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Eric Baker is an atheist, and if you asked him where his atheism came from, he would not tell you a story about rebellion. He would give you a genealogy. "My grandfather was a liberal academic and my...
Shari Sabelli's childhood was not predictable. Her parents divorced. Her mother was in and out of the hospital. The adults at the center of her world were, by her own account, not close to her. But...
When their children became teenagers, Howard and Kathy Rosenberg did something that looks, on a spreadsheet, like a pure loss. They sold up and moved house, not for a bigger plot or a better school...
Two sociologists sat in the back of French law offices with, in effect, a stopwatch. Celine Bessiere and Sibylle Gollac, whose book The Gender of Capital: How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality...
Here is what most of us believe happens when a family estate is divided or a marriage is dissolved. Somewhere, a professional sits down with the file, lists everything the family owns, puts an honest...
Somewhere in the middle of The Stewardship of Wealth, his 2012 book on how families keep money across generations, Gregory Curtis draws a caricature so precise it stings. He is describing how a...
Somewhere this week, a family handed its money to someone. Maybe a sister in Houston wired three years of savings to an uncle back home who promised to handle the purchase of a plot. Maybe a founder...
Ask people what makes wealthy families loyal to their financial advisors and almost everyone gives the same answer: returns. The rich, we assume, follow the money, and the advisor who delivers the...
Some financial arguments need a whiteboard. The best one in Get Rich, Stay Rich, Pass It On needs three sentences. Catherine S. McBreen and George H. Walper, Jr., whose research firm Spectrem Group...
In January 2015, a man named Dominic Gardenia sat in his office in Springfield, Missouri, holding the largest offer of his life and feeling something close to grief. A national chain had come for the...
Ken Wilson lives in Hawaii with his wife and six children, aged eight to seventeen. The rest of his extended family lives in Portland, Maine, about as far away as the United States allows while...
For five generations, the Brown family of Kentucky has run Brown-Forman, the distillery behind Jack Daniel's, and for five generations its young heirs have grown up knowing exactly what the door into...
In 1946, in Akron, Ohio, a husband and wife named Jerry and Goldie Lippman started a business in the washing machine in the basement of Goldie's parents' house. Goldie had worked in Akron's rubber...
In the spring of 2010, a founder named John Manuck was wrapping up a planning meeting with his executive assistant. He had built Techmer PM, a plastics additive company, from nothing since 1981; by...
Somewhere in the pages of a European governance textbook, a Japanese family business owner was asked to explain the difference between a family business and any other kind. Companies measure...
In Belgium there is a family that has owned a steel wire company since 1880. Bekaert employs 27,000 people, sells into more than 120 countries, and is listed on the Brussels stock exchange, yet the...
Somewhere in Germany, a family that has owned a steel business for around 130 years holds its annual owners' meeting. The company has had a good year. Around the table sit cousins from a consortium...
Two consultants who spent their careers inside troubled family companies noticed something eerie. When they mapped their client families on paper, generation above generation, the big events kept...
Almost every budgeting book ever written makes the same silent assumption in its first chapter: that money arrives the way rain arrives in England, a steady drizzle, every month, in roughly the same...
Elizabeth wanted a house so much that it was the first thing on the table when she met her financial planner. She was expecting her first child, and the house in her mind was never really a building....
In September 2008, thousands of careful, safety-minded investors discovered what they actually owned. They had bought products called structured notes, sold to them by brokers as a nearly magical...
The scene takes place at Nonna, a restaurant in Beverly Hills, sometime around 2010. Two investment writers are having lunch when a stranger approaches the table clutching a thick envelope from a...
In September 1992, Stanley Druckenmiller and George Soros looked at the Bank of England and saw something almost no one else had fully priced: the bank did not have the reserves to keep defending the...
On paper, a small-business owner in South Africa is one of the best-supported entrepreneurs on earth. There is the Industrial Development Corporation and the Development Bank of Southern Africa for...