A grand and revelatory portrait of Wall Street’s most storied investment bank Wall Street investment banks move trillions of dollars a year, make billions in fees, pay their executives in the tens of millions of dollars. But even among the most powerful firms, Lazard Frères & Co. stood apart. Discretion, secrecy, and subtle strategy were its weapons of choice. For more than a century, the mystique and reputation of the "Great Men" who worked there allowed the firm to garner unimaginable profits, social cachet, and outsized influence in the halls of power. But in the mid-1980s, their titanic egos started getting in the way, and the Great Men of Lazard jeopardized all they had built. William D. Cohan, himself a former high-level Wall Street banker, takes the reader into the mysterious and secretive world of Lazard and presents a compelling portrait of Wall Street through the tumultuous history of this exalted and fascinating company. Cohan deconstructs the explosive feuds between Felix Rohatyn and Steve Rattner, superstar investment bankers and pillars of New York society, and between the man who controlled Lazard, the inscrutable French billionaire Michel David-Weill, and his chosen successor, Bruce Wasserstein. Cohan follows Felix, the consummate adviser, as he reshapes corporate America in the 1970s and 1980s, saves New York City from bankruptcy, and positions himself in New York society and in Washington. Felix’s dreams are dashed after the arrival of Steve, a formidable and ambitious former newspaper reporter. By the mid-1990s, as Lazard neared its 150th anniversary, Steve and Felix were feuding openly. The internal strife caused by their arguments could not be solved by the imperious Michel, whose manipulative tendencies served only to exacerbate the trouble within the firm. Increasingly desperate, Michel took the unprecedented step of relinquishing operational control of Lazard to one of the few Great Men still around, Bruce Wasserstein, then fresh from selling his own M&A boutique, for $1.4 billion. Bruce’s take: more than $600 million. But it turned out Great Man Bruce had snookered Great Man Michel when the Frenchman was at his most vulnerable. The LastTycoons is a tale of vaulting ambitions, whispered advice, worldly mistresses, fabulous art collections, and enormous wealth—a story of high drama in the world of high finance.
... CEO of Goldman Sachs, Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, and Robert Rubin, ... Kenneth Griffin, CEO of Citadel Investment Group, and Stanley Druckenmiller, CEO of Duquesne Capital Management.
Praise for William D. Cohan “Cohan writes with an insider’s knowledge of the workings of Wall Street, a reporter’s investigative instincts and a natural storyteller’s narrative command.”—The New York Times “[Cohan is] one of ...
A story that William D. Cohan, who worked for six years at Lazard Frères New York before taking on other positions of responsibility on Wall Street, recounts with maestria.*Buy now the summary of this book for the modest price of a cup of ...
... Jr., 182 Pierre Hotel, 81 Pillsbury, 96-98 Pillsbury, John S., 96 Piper, Jaffray & Hopwood, 96.97 Pittsburgh, Pa., 41 "Planning for the Next Financial Crisis" (Summers), 307–8 Plaza Hotel, 122–23 Poland, 76 Polk, Davis, 270 Pollack, ...
The ops component of TPG is overseen by Dick Boyce, a slight, serious looking fellow who came to the firm almost 15 years ago, recruited by Jim Coulter. The TPG founder had met Boyce a decade earlier when Coulter was a summer associate ...
This edition of The Last Tycoon contains the six chapters that had been completed at the time of Fitzgerald’s death in 1940.
Or Blake. Maybe both of them. 'Of course, looking at the dates, she was presumably pregnantwhensheleftyou,sotheycouldbeyours,orshecould havebeenhavinganaffairwiththisBlakecharacterbefore...' He glared at the unfortunate P.I. 'Just stick ...
I've been in the air with three friends, Jerry Gerber—that's Gerber knives—John Kennedy, and Tiger Warren, Geraldine Pope's first husband, who crashed his plane into the Columbia River, killing himself and his three sons.
For several weeks, the stock market battle had fallen silent, with the Transit Company stock lying exhausted below 30. Just before Christmas, Vanderbilt and his friends began to buy heavily. Aroused by the large purchases, ...
See also Carolyn C. Cooper, Shaping Invention: Thomas Blanchard's Machinery and Patent Management in Nineteenth-Century ... For Springfield's interest, and the history of Blanchard's contract, besides Cooper, I used Merritt Roe Smith, ...