The Predators' Ball

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pages: 507 words: 145,878

The Predators' Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the JunkBond Raiders by Connie Bruck

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, financial independence, fixed income, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, offshore financial centre, Oscar Wyatt, paper trading, profit maximization, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Predators' Ball, yield management, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

He had arrived at the conference earlier in the day, and then came a news broadcast that a terrorist bomb had exploded aboard a TWA flight from Rome to Athens. Icahn turned and headed back to New York. He may well have been remembering his visit to the Predators’ Ball one year before. Then, he had had no major company to run. Then, he had had his money in no situation that he could not control. Then, he had been fresh from his Phillips grand slam, where he had played his game and made $52.5 million in ten weeks. And then, he had stopped in at Peiser’s presentation. BY OCTOBER 1986, six months after Icahn had departed hastily from the Predators’ Ball, he had subdued—at least for the short term—his demons at TWA. The staggering losses of the first half of the year—$275.6 million—had been stanched.

Dozens of them ferried guests from the lush green-and-pink medley of the Beverly Hills Hotel—then owned by arbitrageur Ivan Boesky, his wife and his in-laws, and completely booked by Drexel for these four nights—through the city’s wide, stately, palm-tree-lined streets. Their destination was the Beverly Hilton, where the annual Drexel High Yield Bond Conference—by now known as the Predators’ Ball—was being held, just a few blocks from Drexel’s West Coast office. Breakfast was served at 6 A.M., a concession to popular tastes by Milken, who was at his desk each day by 4:30 A.M. Then came the perpetual round of presentations, sometimes three simultaneously in different rooms, given by heads of companies.

“Instead of a dialogue, it’s like watching TV,” complained James Caywood of Caywood-Christian Capital Management, who manages about $2.2 billion, mainly for savings-and-loan associations (S&Ls), and is an old-timer in the junk market. “The conference has become—excuse my language—a gangbang.” It had also, this year, become the Predators’ Ball. There was a new gospel—or, more, a kind of added liturgy—being preached these days by Milken, who had become more messianic, more fevered, more wired, than ever. His message, received with wild excitement by this congregation, was that they should save corporate America from itself. Milken had long professed contempt for the corporate establishment, portraying many of its members as fat, poorly managed behemoths who squandered their excess capital and whose investment-grade bonds, as he loved to say, could move in only one direction—down.


pages: 706 words: 206,202

Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, creative destruction, deal flow, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, fixed income, fudge factor, George Gilder, index arbitrage, Internet Archive, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, Oscar Wyatt, Ponzi scheme, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Predators' Ball, walking around money, zero-coupon bond

Under an earlier agreement with Bruck, Joseph was allowed to read it and comment on the facts, but not make copies. He knew immediately that there would be trouble. Titled The Predators' Ball: The Junk Bond Raiders and the Man Who Staked Them, the book was a thorough, sober study of Drexel, Milken, and several of their clients, a groundbreaking examination of Milken's junk-bond empire. The book reported that Drexel had hired prostitutes for the Predators' Ball, that in his early days at Drexel Milken had worn a miner's helmet on the commuter bus so he could read prospectuses in the dark, and that the junk-bond king himself had tried to buy Bruck out of writing the book.

page 112 Engel denies Joseph's allegations, and has never been charged with any wrongdoing in connection with the incident. page 112 Engel's dismissal was reported in Bruck, The Predators' Ball, pp. 337-339. page 116 The 1985 Predators' Ball was the subject of Anthony Bianco, "The Growing Respectability of the Junk Heap," Business Week, Apr. 22, 1985. page 118 Bruck reported the presence of prostitutes at the 1985 Predators' Ball, quoting participants such as Fred Sullivan, chairman of Kidde Inc. (Bruck, The Predators' Ball, p. 15). Joseph and Engel deny the assertion. page 118 The quotation is from Peter Dworkin, "The Inside Story on the High Tech of Finance," San Francisco Chronicle, Apr. 4, 1985.

page 354 Engel's return to Drexel, and subsequent departure, is discussed in Bruck, The Predators' Ball, pp. 338-342. page 355 The Drexel video at the 1987 Predators' Ball was described in Steve Coll, "Drexel's Faithful Sing Praises of Junk Bonds," Washington Post, Apr. 5, 1987. The quotation, "How much did we pay that guy?" is from that article. page 355 The "guilty conscience" quote is from Coll, "Drexel's Faithful." page 356 The quote "When the going gets tough . . ." and description of the junk-bond celebration are from Bruck, The Predators' Ball, p. 348. page 356 The article described is Laurie P. Cohen, "Drexel's New Television Ad Tugs at the Heart but Fudges the Facts," Wall Street Journal, Dec. 8, 1987.


pages: 274 words: 93,758

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller, Stanley B Resor Professor Of Economics Robert J Shiller

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compensation consultant, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Brooks, desegregation, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equity premium, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, greed is good, income per capita, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, loss aversion, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Milgram experiment, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, publication bias, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave

Connie Bruck, The Predators’ Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the Junk Bond Raiders (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), pp. 193–240; Robert J. Cole, “Pantry Pride Revlon Bid Raised by $1.75 a Share,” New York Times, October 19, 1985, accessed March 17, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/19/business/pantry-pride-revlon-bid-raised-by-1.75-a-share.html. 21. Paul Asquith, David W. Mullins Jr., and Eric D. Wolff, “Original Issue High Yield Bonds: Aging Analyses of Defaults, Exchanges and Calls,” Journal of Finance 44, no. 4 (1989): 924. 22. Bruck, The Predators’ Ball, p. 76. 23.

Summers, “Breach of Trust in Hostile Takeovers,” in Corporate Takeovers: Causes and Consequences, ed. Alan J. Auerbach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 33–68. 30. Brian Hindo and Moira Herbst, “Personal Best Timeline, 1986: ‘Greed Is Good,’” BusinessWeek, http://www.bloomberg.com/ss/06/08/personalbest_timeline/source/7.htm. 31. Bruck, The Predators’ Ball, p. 320. 32. Bruck, The Predators’ Ball. 33. FDIC v. Milken, pp. 70–71. 34. Alison Leigh Cowan, “F.D.I.C. Backs Deal by Milken,” New York Times, March 10, 1992. 35. See Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 291, fig. 8.5, and p. 292, fig. 8.6. 36.

Asquith, Mullins, and Wolff, “Original Issue High Yield Bonds,” p. 929, table 2: weighted average of first four numbers in right-hand column. 24. Ibid. Number of successful exchanges that have defaulted (16, in table 7, p. 935) on new issuances from 1977 to 1980 divided by new issuances from 1977 to 1980 (155, in table 1, p. 928). 25. Bruck, The Predators’ Ball, p. 10. 26. Stewart, Den of Thieves, p. 243. 27. Kurt Eichenwald, “Wages Even Wall St. Can’t Stomach,” New York Times, April 3, 1989, asserted that Milken had the highest one-year pay in US history. 28. See, for example, Michael C. Jensen, “Takeovers: Their Causes and Consequences,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 2, no. 1 (Winter 1988): 21–48. 29.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Quoted in Baker and Smith, The New Financial Capitalists: 82. 22. Connie Bruck (1988) The Predators’ Ball: How Michael Milken and his Junk Bond Machine Staked the Corporate Raiders, Simon & Schuster, New York: 37. 23. Benjamin J. Stein (1992) A License to Steal: The Untold Story of Michael Milken and the Conspiracy to Bilk the Nation, Simon & Schuster, New York: 24, 25. 24. Sobel, Dangerous Dreamers, John Wiley, New York: 99. 25. Stein, A License to Steal: Chapter 9. 26. Sobel, Dangerous Dreamers: 187–91. 27. Bruck, The Predators’ Ball: 29. 28. Quoted in Sobel Dangerous Dreamers: 79. 29. Bryan Burroughs and John Helyar (1990) Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, Harper & Row, New York. 30.

Bryan Burroughs and John Helyar (1990) Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, Harper & Row, New York. 30. Bruck, The Predators’ Ball: 66. 31. Quoted in Sobel, Dangerous Dreamers: 146. 32. Ibid: 90. 33. Bruck, The Predators’ Ball: 197. 34. Ibid: 15. 35. Ibid: 66. 36. Ibid: 295. 37. Sobel, Dangerous Dreamers: 124. 38. Quoted in Ron Chernow (1990) The House of Morgan, Simon & Schuster, New York: 693. 39. Sobel, Dangerous Dreamers: 105. 40. Quoted in ibid: 120. 41. Quoted in ibid: 168. 42. Alan Greenspan, Statement before the Senate Finance Committee (26 January 1989). 43. Michael Jensen “Corporate control and the politics of finance” (Summer 1991) Journal of Applied Corporate Finance 4/2. 44.

Michael Jensen “Corporate control and the politics of finance” (Summer 1991) Journal of Applied Corporate Finance 4/2. 44. Bruck, The Predators’ Ball: 254. 45. James B. Stewart (1992) Den of Thieves, Simon & Schuster, New York: 261. 46. Sobel, Dangerous Dreamers: 2. 47. Stein, A License to Steal: 24, 25. 48. Bruck, The Predators’ Ball: 266. Chapter 10—Private Vices 1. Robert Sobel (1993) Dangerous Dreamers: The Financial Innovators from Charles Merrill to Michael Milken, John Wiley, New York: 191. 2. http://resident-alien.blogspot.com/2007/07/public-v-private-equity.html 3. Edward Chancellor with Lauren Silva “The Wizards of Oz: not making sense of Macquarie’s business model” (1 June 1007) Breaking Views; Gideon Haigh “Who’s afraid of Macquarie Banks?


pages: 237 words: 50,758

Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly by John Kay

Andrew Wiles, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, bonus culture, British Empire, business process, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate raider, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, discovery of penicillin, diversification, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, shareholder value, Simon Singh, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk

You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”11 Soon after, Boesky went to prison, convicted of insider trading. The businesses that epitomized the explosion of greed on Wall Street in the 1980s were Salomon Brothers (the firm mercilessly caricatured in Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker)12 and Drexel Burnham Lambert (more gently pilloried in Connie Bruck’s The Predators’ Ball).13 Salomon turned bond trading from a backwater into the activity of choice for the financially ambitious, while Drexel Burnham Lambert pioneered the issue of junk bonds. Salomon, whose abuses had exhausted the patience of the U.S. Treasury, had to be rescued by Warren Buffett (in a rare error) and was eventually taken over by Citigroup (which closed its trading operations).

Dunlap with Bob Andelman, Mean Business: How I Save Bad Companies and Make Good Companies Great (New York: Fireside, 1996), p. xii. 10 Securities and Exchange Commission, “Enforcement Proceedings,” SEC News Digest 2002-171, September 4, 2002. 11 Quoted in James B. Stewart, Den of Thieves (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 223. 12 Michael Lewis, Liar’s Poker: Two Cities, True Greed (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989). 13 Connie Bruck, The Predators’ Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the Junk Bond Raider (London: Penguin, 1989). 14 House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Transcript of Hearing (Richard Fuld), October 6, 2008. 15 Ken Auletta, Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986), p. 235. 16 Lehman was at that time rescued by American Express, which floated the firm in 1994 ahead of its final collapse in 2008.

The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do About It. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1997. Brickman, P., D. Coates, and R. Janoff-Bulman. “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36, no. 8 (1978), pp. 917–27. Bruck, Connie. The Predators’ Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the Junk Bond Raider. London: Penguin, 1989. Byrne, John A. The Whiz Kids: The Founding Fathers of American Business—and the Legacy They Left Us. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1993. Cahoone, Lawrence E., ed. From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology.


pages: 831 words: 98,409

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

In 1991 he founded the Milken Institute, which also hosts an annual global conference sometimes referred to as “Davos with palm trees,” although it is more U.S. and finance-sector centric than the annual gathering of the WEF. The conference takes place at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Milken in his previous life had hosted his legendary junk bond conference called the “Predators’ Ball,” which has been colorfully immortalized in the book by the same title.8 Members of the financial elite, Washington power players, and world-renowned researchers attend the event. Billionaires Leon Black, Steve Schwarzman, Steven A. Cohen, Mort Zuckerman, and Richard LeFrak are regulars, as are former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair and Rwandan president Paul Kagame.

Summers, “Letter from President Summers on Women and Science,” January 19, 2005, http://www.harvard.edu/president/speeches/summers_2005/womensci.php. 7. Maureen Dowd, “Summers of Our Discontent,” New York Times, August 13, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/14/opinion/dowd-summers-of-our-discontent.xhtml. 8. Connie Bruck, The Predators’ Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the Junk Bond Raiders (New York: Penguin, 1989). 9. “Strauss-Kahn Hired by Ukraine Billionaire Viktor Pinchuk,” BBC, February 3, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35488200. 10. Christine Haughney and Peter Lattman, “The Man at the Center of a Dispute at the Dakota,” New York Times, February 25, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/nyregion/26dakota.xhtml. 11.


pages: 314 words: 101,452

Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis

barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, corporate raider, disinformation, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, interest rate swap, Irwin Jacobs, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, nuclear winter, Ponzi scheme, risk free rate, The Predators' Ball, yield curve

Or, to put it the other way around, the new bonds made it possible for the first time for investors to lend money directly to homeowners and shaky companies. And the more investors lent, the more others owed. The consequent leverage is the most distinctive feature of our financial era. In her book The Predators' Ball, Connie Bruck traced the rise of Drexel's junk bond department (Milken reportedly tried to pay the author not to publish). The story she tells begins in 1970, when Michael Milken studied bonds at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Finance. He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame his conventional middle-class upbringing (his father had been an accountant).

Invest in the future of America, the small-growth companies that make us great. It was a populist message. The early junk bond investors, like mortgage investors, could make money and feel good about themselves. "You should have heard Mike's speech each year at the junk bond seminar in Beverly Hills" (known as the Predators' Ball, for the carnivores, like Ronald Perelman, in attendance), says a Drexel executive in New York. "It would have brought tears to your eyes." It's impossible to say exactly how much money Milken converted to his cause. Many investors simply gave over their portfolios to him. Tom Spiegel of Columbia Savings & Loan, for example, responded to Milken's message by inflating his balance sheet from $370 million in assets to $10.4 billion, much of it junk.


pages: 612 words: 179,328

Buffett by Roger Lowenstein

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cashless society, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, index card, index fund, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, Jeffrey Epstein, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Paul Samuelson, random walk, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, traveling salesman, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-coupon bond

Fraud litigation brought by Cinerama, a former Technicolor holder, in 1983 was dismissed in 1995. Cinerama’s appraisal claim against Perelman-owned MacAndrews and Forbes was still pending. See Connie Bruck, The Predators’ Ball: The Junk Bond Raiders and the Man Who Staked Them (New York: American Lawyer/Simon & Schuster, 1988), 199–201; Ralph King, Jr., “Ron Perelman’s $640 Million Unsure Thing,” Forbes, October 30, 1984; and McGough, “The Joys of Being an Insider.” 21. Bruck, The Predators’ Ball, 237. 22. Louis Lowenstein, the author’s father, was the moderator. 23. George Anders, Merchants of Debt (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 113. 24. Transcript of seminar; Knights, Raiders, and Targets, 11–27. 25.

In the words of a lawyer involved in related litigation, Buffett was expected to say that Perelman “screwed the shareholders.”19 Perelman vigorously denied that he had done so. But the case was settled, averting what might have been an interesting face-off.20 Simultaneous to Buffett’s takeover of Scott Fetzer, Perelman demonstrated the new rule of Wall Street—that once in play, a company, as an independent entity, was doomed. As Connie Bruck observed in The Predators’ Ball, Perelman’s assault on Revlon had elements of class war. Michel Bergerac, the cosmetic company’s aristocratic chairman, regarded the cigar-puffing Perelman and his Drexel financiers as “pawnbrokers.” He curtly waved them off, saying the company was not for sale. Perelman sneered back, depicting the lackluster Bergerac, who kept a butler and a suite in Paris (his “castle,” Perelman called it), as an archetype of corporate waste.


pages: 477 words: 144,329

How Money Became Dangerous by Christopher Varelas

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airport security, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, California gold rush, cashless society, corporate raider, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, eat what you kill, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Michael Milken, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, pensions crisis, pets.com, pre–internet, profit motive, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Saturday Night Live, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, universal basic income, zero day

My assigned host was named Grace, a Wharton alumna and very impressive young woman who had already reached VP status even though she appeared to be no older than I was. On the flight out I had read The Predators’ Ball, a new book by Connie Bruck about Milken and Drexel’s forging of the junk bond market. One particularly juicy story described an annual four-day conference that Milken and his boys would throw in Beverly Hills, inviting 1,500 of their top clients—investors, corporate raiders, and CEOs. The conference—named the Predators’ Ball by Milken and his partners—included presentations, extravagant dinners, performances by the likes of Frank Sinatra and Diana Ross, and on one of the nights each year, an exclusive cocktail party for the most powerful guests.


pages: 290 words: 83,248

The Greed Merchants: How the Investment Banks Exploited the System by Philip Augar

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, deal flow, equity risk premium, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, information retrieval, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, new economy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, risk free rate, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, systematic bias, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, yield curve

Augar, Philip, and Palmer, Joy, The Rise of the Player Manager (Penguin Books, 2002), p. 12. 15. Lowenstein, Roger, Origins of the Crash (Penguin Press, 2004), pp. 24–5. 16. Wolfe, Tom, The Bonfire of the Vanities (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987); Wall Street (American Entertainment/20th Century Fox, 1987); Lewis, Michael, Liar’s Poker (Hodder & Stoughton, 1989). 17. Bruck, Connie, The Predators’ Ball (Penguin Books, 1989); Stewart, James B., Den of Thieves (Simon & Schuster, 1991); Kochan, Nick, and Pym, Hugh, The Guinness Affair (Christopher Helm, 1987). 18. For the classic account see James B. Stewart, Den of Thieves, op. cit. 19. Bruck, Connie, op. cit., pp. 369–72. 20. Burrough, Bryan, and Helyar, John, Barbarians at the Gate (Random House, 2001), p. 622. 21.


pages: 269 words: 83,307

Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits by Kevin Roose

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, East Village, eat what you kill, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, fixed income, forward guidance, glass ceiling, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hedonic treadmill, information security, Jane Street, jitney, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Michael Milken, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, plutocrats, proprietary trading, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tail risk, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, two and twenty, urban planning, We are the 99%, work culture , young professional

In some cases, I’ve relied on the interview subject’s account of an incident, and my account is only as good as his or her memory. Reading List For general research into Wall Street’s culture and history, I enjoyed and learned from the following books: Anderson, Geraint. Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile. London: Headline, 2008. Bruck, Connie. The Predators’ Ball: The Junk Bond Raiders and the Man who Staked Them. New York: American Lawyer, 1988. Burrough, Bryan, and John Helyar. Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. Cohan, William D. House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street. New York: Doubleday, 2009.


pages: 801 words: 209,348

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Buffett to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., March 14, 1978. overmatched by the color TVs: T. R. Reid, The Chip (New York: Random House, 2001), 218. The oil crisis: David Halberstam, The Reckoning (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 452–59. Rodeo Drive and Wilshire Boulevard: Connie Bruck, The Predators’ Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the Junk Bond Raiders (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 218. $550 million in cash: James B. Stewart, Den of Thieves (New York: Touchstone, 1992), 243. Walter Braddock Hickman: Bruck, Predators’ Ball, 28. more than a portfolio: W.

Glenn Brown’s History of the United States Capitol. Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1998. Brown, James. I Feel Good: A Memoir of a Life of Soul. New York: New American Library, 2005. Bruck, Connie. Master of the Game: Steven Ross and the Creation of Time Warner. New York: Penguin Books, 1995. ———. The Predators’ Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the Junk Bond Raiders. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. Bruun, Erik, and Jay Crosby, eds. Living History America. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 1999. Bryan, William Jennings. The World’s Famous Orations: America, 1761–1837. Vol. 7.


Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Buffett to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., March 14, 1978. overmatched by the color TVs: T. R. Reid, The Chip (New York: Random House, 2001), 218. The oil crisis: David Halberstam, The Reckoning (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 452–59. Rodeo Drive and Wilshire Boulevard: Connie Bruck, The Predators’ Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the Junk Bond Raiders (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 218. $550 million in cash: James B. Stewart, Den of Thieves (New York: Touchstone, 1992), 243. Walter Braddock Hickman: Bruck, Predators’ Ball, 28. more than a portfolio: W.

Glenn Brown’s History of the United States Capitol. Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1998. Brown, James. I Feel Good: A Memoir of a Life of Soul. New York: New American Library, 2005. Bruck, Connie. Master of the Game: Steven Ross and the Creation of Time Warner. New York: Penguin Books, 1995. ———. The Predators’ Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the Junk Bond Raiders. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. Bruun, Erik, and Jay Crosby, eds. Living History America. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 1999. Bryan, William Jennings. The World’s Famous Orations: America, 1761–1837. Vol. 7.


pages: 324 words: 92,805

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

There was Icahn, who, after raiding TWA, directed the struggling airline to borrow half a billion dollars (most of which he paid to himself), then sold off the airline’s most profitable routes (a practice known as asset stripping) to service the debt. There was even a raiders’ gala—a posh annual conference hosted by the deal-making firm Drexel Burnham Lambert for all the big names in restructuring, known as the “Predators’ Ball.” For many critics, and a great many more traumatized former employees, the corporate raider perfectly captured the “greed is good” zeitgeist that overran American corporate culture in the 1980s. But to an emerging school of conservative economists, the raider was nothing less than an economic savior.


pages: 293 words: 88,490

The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction by Richard Bookstaber

asset allocation, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, data science, disintermediation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, epigenetics, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, geopolitical risk, Henri Poincaré, impact investing, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market clearing, market microstructure, money market fund, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, sovereign wealth fund, the map is not the territory, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, yield curve

Then as things gathered steam, anything that smelled of subprime became garbage: CDOs on subprime and then on anything with mortgage exposure; asset-backed commercial paper backed by mortgage securities; structured investment vehicles (SIVs) that might have mortgage exposure; and credit default swaps (CDSs) meant to insure against firms with these various sorts of exposure—CDSs held as investments, as inventory, and as collateral. The Ball Gets Rolling THE PREDATORS’ BALL Hedge funds have looked for a free pass on the 2008 crisis, because it centered on the banks.5 But the first shot fired came from two hedge funds at Bear Stearns Asset Management (BSAM), and things fell apart quickly from there. These were the Enhanced Leverage Fund and the High-Grade Fund, both of which invested mostly in mortgage-backed securities and CDOs based on subprime mortgages.


pages: 389 words: 109,207

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street by William Poundstone

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Albert Einstein, anti-communist, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, correlation coefficient, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, high net worth, index fund, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, short selling, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Breiman, Leo (1960). “Investment Policies for Expanding Businesses Optimal in a Long-Run Sense.” Naval Research Logistics Quarterly 7:647–51. ———(1961). “Optimal Gambling Systems for Favorable Games.” Fourth Berkeley Symposium on Probability and Statistics 1:65–78. Bruck, Connie (1989). The Predators’ Ball. New York: Penguin. ———(1994). Master of the Game. New York: Simon and Schuster. Buffett, Warren E. (1984). “The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville.” Hermes, the Columbia Business School Magazine, Fall 1984, 4–15. Casanova, Giacomo (1822–28). The Complete Memoirs. Originally published in German from 1822 to 1828.


pages: 385 words: 118,901

Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street by Sheelah Kolhatkar

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Carl Icahn, Donald Trump, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, fear of failure, financial deregulation, hiring and firing, income inequality, junk bonds, light touch regulation, locking in a profit, margin call, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, medical residency, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, p-value, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Predators' Ball

At the time, if someone wanted to trade a stock option, they had to call up a broker at Gruntal or a handful of other firms, explain what kind of bet they wanted to make and over what time horizon, and basically accept whatever price they were given. By 1968, Icahn’s department at Gruntal was bringing in commissions of $1.5 million and was one of the most profitable at the firm. Icahn left that year to start his own company. Connie Bruck, The Predators’ Ball (Penguin, 1989), p. 151. so he could study the stock tables: Jack D. Schwager, Stock Market Wizards (HarperCollins, 2001), p. 269. the area became partial inspiration: Judith S. Goldstein, The Great Gatsby: Inventing Great Neck: Jewish Identity and the American Dream (Rutgers University Press, 2006), p. 3.


pages: 374 words: 114,600

The Quants by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, automated trading system, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, index fund, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, job automation, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kickstarter, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Mercer, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, éminence grise

In December 1987, audiences in movie theaters listened to Gordon Gekko, the slimy takeover artist played by Michael Douglas, proclaim the mantra for the decade in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: “Greed is good.” A series of popular books reflecting the anti–Wall Street sentiment hit the presses: Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, Barbarians at the Gate by Wall Street Journal reporters Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, The Predators’ Ball by Connie Bruck, Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis. The quants were licking their wounds. Their wondrous invention, portfolio insurance, was roundly blamed for the meltdown. Fama’s efficient-market theory was instantly called into question. How could the market be “right” one day, then suffer a 23 percent collapse on virtually no new information the next day, then be fine the day after?


pages: 425 words: 122,223

Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street by Peter L. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, corporate raider, debt deflation, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, law of one price, linear programming, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, martingale, means of production, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, Thales and the olive presses, the market place, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The Brady report explained this tragedy by denouncing “mechanical, price-insensitive selling . . . concentrated in the hands of surprisingly few institutions” and proposed a series of constraints to bring the market’s penchant for wildness under control. The popular literature about the world of investment in the 1980s carries titles that reflect those events: Bonfire of the Vanities, Barbarians at the Gates, The Predators’ Ball, and Liars’ Poker. The main characters are arrogant, greedy, cynical, and shady. At one point or another in their careers, they grow rich beyond the dreams of most of us—largely because they have profited from the new technologies, novel financial instruments, and mysterious investment strategies that emerged from the revolution in finance and investing.


The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, guns versus butter model, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Parents Music Resource Center, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, Timothy McVeigh, Tipper Gore, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

Janet Lowe, Secret Empire: How 25 Multinationals Rule the World (Homewood, IL: Business One Irwin, 1992), p. 5. 9. Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, Barbarians at the Gate (New York: Harper and Row, 1990). 10. U.S. News and World Report, December 12, 1986. 11. John Ehrman, The Eighties (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 23. 12. Connie Bruck, The Predators Ball (New York: Penguin Books, 1986). 13. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1990. 14. National Review, August 31, 1992. 15. John Ehrman, The Eighties (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 109. 16. Charles Jencks, What Is Postmodernism? (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). 17.


pages: 505 words: 142,118

A Man for All Markets by Edward O. Thorp

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carried interest, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Edward Thorp, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, High speed trading, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, Mason jar, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Murray Gell-Mann, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical arbitrage, stem cell, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, Works Progress Administration

and hundreds of books An excellent history of these meanderings is Justin Fox’s book The Myth of the Rational Market. all the future earnings Interpreted as net value paid out or accumulated for the benefit of a sole owner. on inside information As chronicled by James Stewart in Den of Thieves, Connie Bruck in The Predators’ Ball, and others. this type profitably Tobias, Andrew, Money Angles, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1984, pp. 71–72. Often, management would offer to redeem shares at an intermediate price, thus cashing out the dissidents and retaining an asset base of unredeemed shares which they could continue to be paid to manage.


pages: 421 words: 128,094

King of Capital: The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone by David Carey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, fixed income, Future Shock, Gordon Gekko, independent contractor, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, risk tolerance, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, sealed-bid auction, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, éminence grise

Auletta, Greed: Ken Auletta, Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman (New York: Warner Books, 1986). Baker and Smith, Capitalists: George P. Baker and George David Smith, The New Financial Capitalists: Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and the Creation of Corporate Value (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Bruck, Predators: Connie Bruck, The Predators’ Ball: The Junk Bond Raiders and the Man Who Staked Them (New York: The American Lawyer / Simon & Schuster, 1988). Burrough and Helyar, Barbarians: Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco (New York: Harper & Row, 1990). Finkel and Geising, Masters: Robert A.


pages: 436 words: 76

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

"Functional Imaging ofNeural Responses to Expectancy and Experience of Monetary Gains and Losses." Neuron 30 (May): 619-39. Brittan, S. 1971. Steering the Economy. Harmondsworth, Penguin. ---. 1996. Capitalism with a Human Face. London: Fontana Press. Broadie, A., ed. 1997. The Scottish Enlightenment: An Anthology. Edinburgh: Canon gate. Bruck, C. 1989. The Predators, Ball: The Inside Story ofDrexel Burnham and the Rise ofthe Junk Bond Raiders. New York: Penguin. Brunekreeft, G. 1997. Coordination and Competition in the Electricity Pool ofEngland and Wales. Baden-Baden: Nomos-Verlag. Buchan, J. 1997. Frozen Desire: An Enquiry into the Meaning ofMoney. London: Picador.


pages: 461 words: 128,421

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

Manne, “Mergers and the Market for Corporate Control,” Journal of Political Economy (April 1965): 113. 31. Manne, “Mergers and the Market,” 112. 32. Louis Lowenstein, “Pruning Deadwood in Hostile Takeovers: A Proposal for Legislation,” Columbia Law Review (March 1983): 251–52. 33. Both the Milken background and the rise of the takeover artists are recounted in Connie Bruck, The Predators’ Ball: The Junk Bond Raiders and the Man Who Staked Them (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988). Drexel was not the first firm to “manufacture” junk bonds; Lehman Brothers was, in 1977. But Drexel soon came to dominate the business. 34. Years later, after a federal judge had thrown Milken in jail for securities fraud, Chicago professor and soon-to-be law school dean Daniel Fischel wrote a book with the very unprofessorial title Payback: The Conspiracy to Destroy Michael Milken and His Financial Revolution (New York: HarperBusiness, 1995). 35.


pages: 586 words: 159,901

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom by Doug Henwood

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bond market vigilante , book value, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, kremlinology, labor-force participation, late capitalism, law of one price, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, London Interbank Offered Rate, long and variable lags, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, publication bias, Ralph Nader, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Litzenberger (1989). "Empirical Tests of the Consumption-Oriented CAPM," fournal of Finance 44, pp. 231-262. Brooks, John (1973). The Go-Go Years (New York: Weybright and Talley). Brown, Norman O. (1985). Life Against Death (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press). Bruck, Connie (1988). The Predators' Ball (New York: The American Lawyer/Simon and Schuster). Bulow, Jeremy, and Paul Klemperer (1991). "Rational Frenzies and Crashes," Centre for Economic Policy Research Discussion Paper No. 593 (London, CEPR, October). Burrough, Bryan, and John Helyar (1990). Barbarians at the Gate (New York: Harper & Row).


pages: 1,336 words: 415,037

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

The bankers’ fees became so staggering that, instead of waiting for deals to present themselves, the bankers went a-huntin’ on their own, flipping through the ranks of the S&P 1000 the way Buffett had once used his Moody’s Manuals to find cigar-butt stocks. This orgy of mergers that often took place with the consent of only one party riveted the public; the clashes of titanic egos filled the daily papers. Michael Milken’s annual junk-bond conference, the Predators’ Ball,6 lent its name to the entire era. Buffett scorned the way these deals transferred riches from shareholders to managers and corporate raiders, helped by a long, long line of toll-taking bankers, brokers, and lawyers.7 “We don’t do hostile takeovers,” he said. The deals of the 1980s repelled him above all because they were loaded with debt.

Weiner, What Goes Up: The Uncensored History of Modern Wall Street as Told by the Bankers, Brokers, CEOs, and Scoundrels Who Made It Happen. New York: Little, Brown, 2005. 5. They started out as investment-grade bonds, but when their issuers cratered, the bonds became so cheap that they paid a higher rate; e.g., a bond that yielded 7% would yield 10% if the price of the bond dropped to 70% of par. 6. See Connie Bruck, The Predators’ Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the Junk Bond Raiders. New York: The American Lawyer: Simon & Schuster, 1988. 7. Typically the deals worked either by giving shareholders who sold a higher price but leaving a much weakened company for those who didn’t, or by offering a premium that was only a fraction of the value the buyer would create through actions the former management should have taken themselves.


pages: 613 words: 200,826

Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles by Michael Gross

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, Donald Trump, estate planning, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, Henry Singleton, Irwin Jacobs, Joan Didion, junk bonds, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil rush, passive investing, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, Right to Buy, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, transcontinental railway, yellow journalism

Chicago: Western Historical Association–Lewis Publishing Company, 1922. Brown, Peter Harry, and Pat H. Broeske. Howard Hughes: The Untold Story. New York: Penguin Group, 1996. Brown, Peter Harry, and Patte B. Barham. Marilyn: The Last Take. New York: Dutton,1992. Bruck, Connie. When Hollywood Had a King. New York: Random House, 2003. ——. The Predators’ Ball: Junk-Bond Traders and the Man Who Staked Them. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. Cantor, Bert. The Bernie Cornfeld Story. New York: Lyle Stuart Inc., 1970. Carr, Harry. Los Angeles. New York: D. Appleton–Century Company, 1935. Cassini, Oleg. In My Own Fashion: An Autobiography. New York: Pocket Books, 1987.


pages: 601 words: 193,225

740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building by Michael Gross

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Glass-Steagall Act, Irwin Jacobs, it's over 9,000, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, junk bonds, McMansion, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, short selling, strikebreaker, The Predators' Ball, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

New York: Viking, 2000. BRAUDY, SUSAN. This Crazy Thing Called Love. New York: Knopf, 1992. BROOKS, JOHN. The Go-Go Years. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1973. ———. Once in Golconda. New York: W. W. Norton, 1969. BRUCK, CONNIE. Master of the Game. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. ———. The Predators’ Ball. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988. BYRON, CHRISTOPHER. Testosterone, Inc. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2004. CARNOCHAN, W. B. Momentary Bliss: An American Memoir. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Libraries, 1999. CHERNOW, RON. The House of Morgan. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990. ———.


pages: 726 words: 210,048

Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger, Thomas Petzinger Jr.

airline deregulation, Boeing 747, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, cross-subsidies, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, feminist movement, index card, junk bonds, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Michael Milken, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, revenue passenger mile, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Predators' Ball, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, yield management, zero-sum game

.: Harvard University Press, 1982. Brown, Anthony E. The Politics of Airline Deregulation. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987. Brown, Mick. Richard Branson: The Inside Story. London: Headline, 1989. Brown, Stanley H. Ling: The Rise, Fall, and Return of a Texas Titan. New York: Atheneum, 1972. Bruck, Connie. The Predators Ball. New York: The American Lawyer/Simon & Schuster, 1988. Campbell-Smith, Duncan. The British Airways Story. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1986. Carter, Jimmy. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. Washington, DC.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977. 11, Richard E. Air Transport and Its Regulators, An Industry Study.