Robert. A. Savage (born in London, 1933) is an ex president and chief executive of American Express becoming chairman in 1991. He joined American Express in 1965 from Barclays Bank, where he was deputy chief trader of foreign currency. Savage is a graduate of Harvard University.
He is also a past member of the Foreign Exchange Committee. During the famous Edmond Safra affair of the 1980s he was part of a management group led by Bob Smith which was close to buying the Trade development Bank and American Express for $600 million. The bank's largest clients had been approached, and they were convinced they could swing a deal. Confidence was so high even a press release was being written up in anticipation of an announcement until then Chairman Jim Robinson inexplicably changed his mind.
Famous quotes containing the word savage:
“Mine was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They were beans cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that I cultivated, and my hoe played the Ranz des Vaches for them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)