Baroness Ariane de Rothschild: Saying taxes should be raised for the sake of it isn't the solution; governments should review their policies first'

"Ariane Langer is today the Baroness Ariane de Rothschild, but 59 years ago, when she was born in San Salvador in El Salvador, she was simply the daughter of an expatriate executive working for a German pharmaceutical multinational in that small country. I didn't set foot in Europe until I was 18. It seemed like a world of madmen. It was so cold, she admits. She was used to other climates."

"She began her career at AIG, first in New York and then in Paris. It was in the French capital that her life changed forever: one of the insurance company's clients was Benjamin de Rothschild, the seventh generation of the famous banking dynasty. The Rothschild family expanded across Europe in the 19th century. The patriarch sent four of his five sons to the major capitals of the time to spread the banking model he had created."

Rothschild evokes money, power, and intrigue. For 250 years the dynasty financed major historical events from the Napoleonic Wars to the Suez Canal and the Zionist dream of the State of Israel. Mayer Amschel founded his empire in the Frankfurt ghetto at the end of the 18th century and directed that business remain with male heirs and that the family's Jewish roots be preserved, even through endogamy. The current banking group from his line is now led by a woman who is neither Rothschild by blood nor Jewish. Ariane Langer was born in El Salvador, raised across Latin America and Africa, studied in Paris and the United States, worked at AIG in New York and Paris, and met Benjamin de Rothschild while he was a client.

Read at english.elpais.com