Brown Brothers Harriman: The Shadowy Investment Bank That Built America’s Financial System

History Unplugged Podcast · Sep 2, 2021 · 37m

Conspiracy theories have always swirled around Brown Brothers Harriman, the oldest and one of the largest private investment banks in the United States, and not without reason. As America of the 1800s was convulsed by devastating financial panics every twenty years, the Brown Brothers Harriman quietly went from strength to strength, propping up the US financial system at crucial moments while avoiding the unwelcome attention that plagued many of its competitors. Throughout the nineteenth century, the partners helped to create paper money as the primary medium of American capitalism…