By William D. Cohan
A grand and revelatory portrait of Wall Street’s such a lot storied funding bank
Wall road funding banks circulate trillions of bucks a 12 months, make billions in charges, pay their executives within the hundreds of thousands of bucks. yet even between the most powerful firms, Lazard Frères & Co. stood aside. Discretion, secrecy, and subtle approach have been its guns of selection. For more than a century, the mystique and attractiveness of the "Great males" who labored there allowed the enterprise to garner incredible gains, social cachet, and oversized impression within the halls of energy. yet within the mid-1980s, their vast egos all started moving into the best way, and the nice males of Lazard jeopardized all that they had built.
William D. Cohan, himself a former high-level Wall highway banker, takes the reader into the mysterious and secretive international of Lazard and presents a compelling portrait of Wall highway via the tumultuous history of this exalted and interesting company. Cohan deconstructs the explosive feuds among Felix Rohatyn and Steve Rattner, megastar funding bankers and pillars of recent York society, and among the guy who managed Lazard, the inscrutable French billionaire Michel David-Weill, and his selected successor, Bruce Wasserstein.
Cohan follows Felix, the consummate adviser, as he reshapes company the USA within the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties, saves ny urban from financial disaster, and positions himself in ny society and in Washington. Felix’s goals are dashed after the arriving of Steve, a powerful and impressive former newspaper reporter. By the mid-1990s, as Lazard neared its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary, Steve and Felix have been feuding openly.
The inner strife brought on by their arguments couldn't be solved by means of the imperious Michel, whose manipulative traits served purely to exacerbate the difficulty in the enterprise. more and more determined, Michel took the remarkable step of relinquishing operational keep watch over of Lazard to at least one of the few nice males nonetheless round, Bruce Wasserstein, then clean from promoting his personal M&A boutique, for $1.4 billion. Bruce’s take: greater than $600 million. But it grew to become out nice guy Bruce had snookered nice guy Michel while the Frenchman used to be at his such a lot vulnerable.
The LastTycoons is a story of vaulting goals, whispered suggestion, worldly mistresses, wonderful artwork collections, and large wealth—a tale of excessive drama on this planet of excessive finance.
Read or Download The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. PDF
Similar Economics books
Throwing the Elephant: Zen and the Art of Managing Up
Sit. Breathe deep. this can be the final company booklet you are going to ever want. For in those pages, Stanley Bing solves the final word challenge of your operating lifestyles: easy methods to deal with the boss. The approach is straightforward . . . so simple as throwing an elephant. All it takes is the right kind mind set, a step by step plan, and a superb jump of religion.
Managerial Economics & Business Strategy
Baye’s Managerial Economics and enterprise process is still the best-selling managerial economics textbook during which it maintains to supply scholars with the instruments from intermediate microeconomics, online game idea, and commercial association to make sound managerial judgements. Baye is understood for its real-world examples, frontier learn, inclusion of recent themes no longer present in different managerial books, in addition to balanced assurance of conventional and smooth microeconomic instruments.
Free to Choose: A Personal Statement
The foreign bestseller at the volume to which own freedom has been eroded via executive laws and organisations whereas own prosperity has been undermined by way of govt spending and fiscal controls. New Foreword via the Authors; Index.
Austrian Economics in Transition: From Carl Menger to Friedrich Hayek
This book analyzes either the consistent and altering parts within the Austrian university of Economics seeing that its origin within the overdue nineteenth Century as much as the hot offspring of this School. It investigates the dynamic metamorphosis of the varsity, in most cases just about its touch with representatives of background of financial proposal.
Extra resources for The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co.
Thankfully, neither she nor her kids have been within the house on the time. In all of the commotion, she remembered she had agreed to fulfill Felix (Gaillet broadcasts his identify with a moderate French accessory, Fay-leex). She scurried all the way down to East Sixty-second highway and located Felix, who, whereas sympathetic, used to be now not relatively satisfied that his night were ruined. He provided to assist her financially. She accredited from him, correct then and there, a fee for numerous thousand funds, made out to money, to work out her via this very tough patch. “Which i assumed used to be tremendously generous,” she stated. yet at that very second, he additionally stopped calling her. The affair used to be over until eventually, six months later, Felix known as her “out of the blue” and requested her to fulfill him on the pied-à-terre. They resumed the affair “as if we had visible one another the week earlier than. ” 4 weeks later, he introduced to her: “I am head over heels in love with you. i need to reside with you. I’m going to split from my spouse, and we’re going to dwell jointly. ” Gaillet was once stunned by way of this assertion, for she used to be now not rather in love with Felix for the reason that their dating had develop into quite one-dimensional. “I truly fell head over heels in love with him when we began dwelling together,” she acknowledged. He informed her to discover an residence to hire, and he might circulation in together with her and get a separation from his spouse. Gaillet fast came across and rented a sixteen-hundred-square-foot penthouse condo, with a wraparound terrace and a fire, on the lodge Alrae, at 37 East Sixty-fourth highway (now the posh Plaza Athénée). there have been round the clock doormen and room provider on hand from the Henry IV eating place. on the time Felix and Helene have been dwelling on the lodge, newspaper and journal articles approximately Felix made no point out of his affair. quite, he was once defined as dwelling the lifetime of the a little bit matted bachelor in a rundown “residential” inn. The articles sincerely conveyed a feeling that Felix didn't care approximately funds or fairly how he lived. His lodgings on the Alrae have been frequently defined as “less than luxurious” and “small,” and no point out used to be ever made from his infidelities. He was once portrayed as dwelling a modest and cerebral bachelor lifestyles, with time spent interpreting mysteries and histories and speaking to his neighbors in artwork, publishing, and political circles—an snapshot that served his function in the course of the excruciatingly tough negotiations with the recent York urban unions through the financial difficulty. His “humble” homestead on the Alrae was once, based on a 1976 profile of him within the instances, full of books, magazines, camping out and activities gear belonging to him and his 3 sons, and motorcycles. The wines within the entrance closet are humble Côtes du Rhône. His motor vehicle is a four-year-old BMW station wagon, additionally crammed with camping out apparatus. Rohatyn’s fits are something yet modish. To the disgust of Lazard’s senior accomplice, André Meyer, Rohatyn seemed on the Governor’s facet in the course of a weekend of rather momentous conferences at the city’s destiny final fall, donning a black turtleneck sweater.