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Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. (BBH) is the oldest and largest partnership bank in the United States. The firm has 40 partners and employs over 3,500 people in eight domestic and seven overseas locations. The firm currently oversees $44 billion in client assets, including over $16 billion for families and individuals.

In addition to a full range of commercial banking facilities, the firm is among the leading providers of global custody, foreign exchange, private equity, merger and acquisition services, investment management for individuals and institutions, personal trust & estate administration and securities brokerage.

Contents 1 History 2 Nazi Connections 3 Locations 4 Skull & Bones Association 5 External links

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

The bank had a huge windfall in 1933 with the passage of the Banking Act of 1933, a.k.a. the Second Glass-Steagall Act. Commercial banks were prohibited from the investment banking business giving private firms like Brown Brothers Harriman monopoly control.

In 1939 BBH was called before the Temporary National Economic Committee to account for questionable mergers. Many records of the committee are still sealed today.

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". Retrieved on 2007-11-12..

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.

The firm has locations in the following fifteen cities around the world:

• Boston
• Charlotte
• Chicago
• Dallas
• Dublin

• Hong Kong
• London
• Luxembourg
• New Jersey
• New York
• Palm Beach
• Philadelphia
• Tokyo
• Zurich

Since 1978, business of the Russell Trust Association was handled by its single trustee, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. partner John B. Madden, Jr. Madden started with Brown Brothers & Harriman in 1946, under senior partner Prescott Bush, George Herbert Walker Bush's father.

The Russell Trust Association is the business name for the New Haven, Connecticut based Skull and Bones society, incorporated in 1856.

In 1943, by special act of the Connecticut state legislature, its trustees were granted an exemption from filing corporate reports with the Secretary of State, which is normally a requirement.

On its 2004 Form 990, the Russell Trust Association reported $3,205,143 in net assets.

The business and political network of the Skull and Bones is well detailed by Hoover Institution scholar Antony Sutton in the expose America's Secret Establishment.

• Brown Brothers Harriman website
• Time Magazine Dec. 22, 1930
• Irving Katz review of, Partners in Banking: A historical portrait of a great private bank Brown Brothers Harriman Co., John A. Kouwenhoven, Business History Review, 1968
• Records of the Temporary National Economic Committee