It is with great sorrow that we note the recent passing of our dear friend Jonathan Auerbach, whose investment dispatches from around the world were as entertaining as they were enlightening. He was an ebullient optimist in these troubled times, and it was this quality, along with his extraordinary generosity and kindness, that we will recall most fondly. Jon was given to doing business deals on a handshake, sometimes in places where you or I wouldn’t dare travel without an armed escort or a letter of introduction from the local chieftain. A photo in his midtown NYC office showed a fledging stock exchange in a place so remote that it shared space with a café. And yet, never once did he pay a bribe in any of these backwaters, nor was he ever threatened by some Banana Republic dictator to come to terms. Some men are easy to like and to trust, and Jon was one of them. He was a gentleman’s gentleman and one of the classiest guys we’ve had the pleasure to know. The Yiddish word for men like Jonathan Auerbach is “mensch,” and he stood out even among them.
Global Reach
He departed this world supposedly owing us dinner at Peter Lugar’s. Jon had always insisted that our daily forecasts made him “tons of money.” This was surely a kind exaggeration, since his investment style — wholly unlike ours, which is to trade for relatively small gains — was to swing for the fences. Few stockbrokers with global reach have done this more successfully than Auerbach, Grayson & Co. The firm operates in 130 markets around the world and was among the first foreign brokers to do business in Iraq, Egypt, South Africa and Russia. “Even when they’re bombing in Gaza, they’re trading in Ramallah,” Auerbach told Parag Khanna, author of the book How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance. When the Berlin Wall came down, Jon had the amazingly good judgment to hire as his man in Russia a young Sovet émigré who had been living in a basement apartment in Manhattan. Today, that man is one of the wealthiest and most influential deal-makers on the scene in Moscow. Like so many others in the investment world, he owes his start to Jonathan Auerbach.
A magnificent human being has left us, felled by lung cancer at 70. May he rest in peace.