Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.

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"BBH" redirects here. For the advertising agency, see Bartle Bogle Hegarty.

Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. (BBH) is the oldest and largest partnership bank in the United States. The firm has 39 partners, over $3.7 billion in assets, and employs 2,700 people in fifteen locations around the world.

1 History
2 Nazi Connections
3 Locations
4 External links

[edit] History

Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. was created through the 1931 merger of Brown Brothers & Co., a merchant bank founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1818 with Harriman Brothers & Co., established in New York City in 1927, and A. Harriman & Co..

Its initial partners were:

W. Averell Harriman
E. Roland Harriman
Moreau Delano
Thatcher Brown
Prescott S. Bush
Granger Kent Costikyan
Louis Curtis
Robert A. Lovett
Ray Morris
Knight Woolley

Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. was the main Wall Street connection for German companies and the varied U.S. financial interests of Fritz Thyssen, who had been an early financial backer of the Nazi party until 1938, but by 1939 had fled Germany and was bitterly denouncing Hitler. Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. had bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, steel, fuel, coal, and U.S. treasury bonds to Germany. These were used to build Hitler's war machine.^{[citation needed]}

All the bank's dealing were fully approved by the U.S. Treasury department, which insisted that trusted Americans handle all the German business in the United States.^{[citation needed]} Once war was declared in December 1941 President Roosevelt signed the Trading With the Enemy Act. On October 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of all German banking interests.

In 2003, the company moved from its signature location at 59 Wall Street, which it had built and occupied since the 1920s, to the Marine Midland Building at Broadway.

Today Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. provides global financial services to the world's largest and most sophisticated mutual funds, hedge funds, asset managers, financial institutions, and insurance companies. Its accolades include being the #1 U.S. agent bank for 10 consecutive years and ranking as "The Best Custodian Ever" by Global Investor magazine.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Nazi Connections

After the seizures in late 1942 of five U.S. enterprises he managed on behalf of Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen, U.S. government documents reveal that Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, failed to divest himself of more than a dozen "enemy national" relationships that continued until as late as 1951.[1]

Furthermore, the records show that Bush and his colleagues routinely attempted to conceal their activities from government investigators.[2]