SOURCE: A review of Paper and Iron, in Journal of Economic History, Vol. 56, No. 2, June, 1996, pp. 506-7.

In the following review, Wengenroth offers a tempered assessment of Paper and Iron, concluding that final judgement of the book depends upon a reader's “political taste.”

After a plethora of books examining the German inflation after World War I via the documents of the Reichsbank, the Berlin government, and those of the magnates of the Ruhr’s heavy industry, Niall Ferguson’s Paper & Iron represents a most welcome shift of perspective in making Hamburg and its business elite the point of departure. At the center of this elite stood the Jewish banker Max Warburg whom Ferguson portrays as the “hero” of his story (p. 30). The book’s main issue, however, is not the unfolding tragedy of this hero but a major revisionist attack on the established orthodoxy in the interpretation of...