Benjamin and Abraham Goldsmid

Benjamin and Abraham Goldsmid were financiers and philanthropists who, as associates of the British prime minister William Pitt the Younger, provided primary financial support to British military campaigns against France during the French Revolutionary wars (1792–99).

Becoming financial brokers in 1777, the Goldsmids soon negotiated several important government loans, breaking a monopoly on public loans enjoyed by England’s leading banking firms. They themselves eventually gained a controlling influence on the stock exchange and became the largest loan contractors of their day in England. Opposition of British bankers to a proposed £14,000,000 Goldsmid loan to the British government, followed by a lapse of the firm’s solvency, resulted in the collapse of the firm and the suicide of Abraham Goldsmid.