Wien doesn't say who The Smartest Man In Europe is, but describes him like this...

 

Many of you remember The Smartest Man from earlier essays; I have been writing about him annually for more than a decade. He has been a friend for thirty years, and during that period he has shown an almost uncanny ability to see major events affecting the financial markets before other observers. Among these were the fall of Japan as an economic power in the 1980s, the economic changes in China and their significance the early 1990s, and the serious consequences of excessive borrowing in the developed world in the last decade.

 

His DNA endowed him with a certain amount of business acumen. His ancestors operated canteens along the Silk Road, selling food, weather protection and supplies to travelers to India and China. He apprenticed in finance in New York, but returned to Europe to take advantage of opportunities created during the post-war recovery there. Along the way he has acquired the ABC’s of European wealth – an airplane, a Bentley and a house on a Cap in the French Riviera. The depth and breadth of his art collection is impressive, but material things are not what gives him a high. He gets his thrills from identifying a problem, thinking it through and being right in determining how it gets resolved. In his ninth decade, he is an inspiration to me.