Henry Kaufman

Henry Kaufman was born into a Jewish family on 1927 in Wenings, Germany. Wenings was a small farm town that unfortunately, when Kaufman was 9, faced an era of anti-Semitism. After the Kaufman family had an encounter with the Nazis, they decided to flee from Germany. By December 1937, the Kaufman family safely reached America, specifically the state of New York.

Henry Kaufman earned a Bachelor’s degree in economics at New York University; this only took him two and a half years to complete. While he was working on his undergraduate degree he was also working towards his master’s degree in finance at Columbia University. After one year later, Kaufman’s master’s degree was completed and he then earned a PhD in banking and finance for New York University.

Henry Kaufman began his research as an economist for the Federal Reserve Bank in New York City. By 1962, Kaufman was hired by Solomon Brothers Inc. as a managing director. Solomon Brothers was where the success of Kaufman really came about. His contributions to the rise of economic and financial forecasting made him a Wall Street leader who often was able to move markets (http://www.businessweek.com.) Kaufman became one of the most powerful people on Wall Street with the call he made during the 1966 credit crunch. Kaufman made forecasts through intuition and good judgment. One idea that Kaufman has analyzed is the securitization of credit which is the conversion of non-marketable assets into marketable assets that can be prices to market and traded. This idea caused a credit explosion. After working at Solomon Brothers Inc from 1962 through 1988, Henry Kaufman resigned due to a disagreement in the company’s future direction. In 1988, Kaufman started his own money management firm, Henry Kaufman & Co.

Henry Kaufman’s projections about interest rates, bond performance, unemployment, and government debt impacted monetary policy in more than one presidential administration as well as prompted swings in the markets. By April of 2000, Kaufman wrote a