Toward Rational Exuberance: The Evolution of the Modern Stock Market
by B. Mark Smith · 1 Jan 2001 · 403pp · 119,206 words
dealings with one of the most powerful figures on Wall Street, a man who had revolutionized the way the Street did business. That man was Michael Milken. Michael Milken, of Drexel Burnham Lambert, was the apostle of what had become known as the junk bond revolution. By outward appearances he was hardly a natural
Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation
by Tom McGrath · 3 Jun 2024 · 326pp · 103,034 words
a higher interest rate, or yield. The bigger upside theoretically balanced out the lower downside—if you had the stomach for it. At the time Michael Milken was immersing himself in the bond world, high-yield bonds were overwhelmingly looked down upon by most traditional Wall Street investment firms. For starters, there
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the question. And so on the recommendation of her stepmother, Fonda instead joined an exercise studio in Century City, California (coincidentally, not far from where Michael Milken would open the West Coast office of Drexel Burnham Lambert that same year). It was part of a small Southern California chain started by a
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said. “Of course, owning a Cuisinart and seeing a good hair stylist doesn’t hurt.” CHAPTER 12 Simon Says As the economy began to revive, Michael Milken found himself sitting at the very center of a corporate finance revolution—both figuratively and literally. A year earlier, four years after he’d first
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gripped the Street were only increasing. The $80 million windfall Bill Simon had generated in the Gibson Greetings LBO was partly responsible for the vibe. Michael Milken’s astonishing success in the junk bond market was another factor. As recently as 1982, eyebrows had been raised on Wall Street when the investment
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were doing.” The first real sign that someone was paying attention had come in the spring of 1986, when authorities brought charges against one of Michael Milken’s colleagues at Drexel Burnham Lambert, Dennis Levine, alleging that he’d made more than $12 million in the market over the previous few years
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.” He was greeted by laughter… then cheers. Of course, what might have been most noteworthy about Ivan Boesky was that he often did business with Michael Milken, who, soon after Boesky’s story went public, received a subpoena from the feds. The Boesky case flipped a switch in the public consciousness. The
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attacks on big corporations, well, they were simply holding corporate managers accountable to shareholders and rooting out inefficiency. Ultimately, Epstein concluded, where you stood on Michael Milken probably depended on what your view of a corporation was. Did a corporation exist merely to serve its legal owners, its shareholders? Or did it
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community, the nation? The tens of thousands of people who’d lost their jobs likely had one opinion about that. There was no question that Michael Milken had a different one. It had been more than a decade since the Boomer colonization of urban neighborhoods had begun—a half dozen years since
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Toll Brothers had: If they had more capital, they could buy even more property on which to build even more houses. They got connected to Michael Milken and his colleagues at Drexel, who arranged millions of dollars of financing for them, in order to expand. By 1986, with $125 million in revenue
Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present
by Jeff Madrick · 11 Jun 2012 · 840pp · 202,245 words
the Anger 11. Paul Volcker, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan Revolution Completed Two THE NEW GUARD 12. Tom Peters and Jack Welch Promises Broken 13. Michael Milken “The Magnificent” 14. Alan Greenspan Ideologue 15. George Soros and John Meriwether Fabulous Wealth and Controversial Power 16. Sandy Weill King of the World 17
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aggressive maneuvers, became generous lenders to companies making bids, especially since they could charge handsome interest rates and high fees per loan. In the 1980s, Michael Milken almost single-handedly developed the junk bond market—where the bonds of riskier companies traded—which was used to finance the largest takeovers to that
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Street world in which information unavailable to others was readily passed on, even at prestigious Goldman. Boesky served three years, but the biggest catch was Michael Milken, whom Boesky implicated for securities law violations. Milken, who had by then become the richest man on Wall Street by selling junk bonds, ultimately pleaded
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by then highly successful, but was still small compared to the networks, bid $5.5 billion for CBS in 1985 with junk bond financing from Michael Milken but failed when no major investment bankers would support the upstart’s bid. The Tisch brothers, financial men who had years earlier acquired Lorillard, the
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football or the best Hollywood movies, or even for movie stars to make TV series. Turner wanted to bid for CBS in 1985, but only Michael Milken supported him, and the deal fell through. CNN kept growing and its twenty-four-hour coverage of the 1990 Iraq conflict raised its reputation to
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banker Martin Siegel was making a large share of its profits in the bulging takeover movement. He was the highest paid employee of the company. Michael Milken’s operation at Drexel Burnham was now churning out enormous revenues and Drexel was becoming a major firm. The Drexel chief executive, Fred Joseph, reasoned
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determined business strategy. Welch made GE into a bank; he did not save American business. Seven years later, the banks in America nearly collapsed. 13 Michael Milken “THE MAGNIFICENT” In the poor economy of the 1970s and the early 1980s, financing for risky companies was especially difficult to raise. A young, independent
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-minded man, Michael Milken, stepped into the breach to provide money for many of these kinds of companies, and later in the 1980s became the key financier of among
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his intensity,” said Martin Siegel, the banker who was also undone by the same insider trading scandal. “That was hard to miss.” Junk bond giant Michael Milken, after being arraigned for securities law violations (Illustration credit 13.1) It seems odd that Mike Milken would be elected to be head cheerleader at
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going well, Milken wanted more capital from Drexel to support trading and underwriting. Burnham obliged, finding a foreign investor, Bruxelles Lambert, to invest. One man, Michael Milken, was buyer and seller of junk bonds, and consultant, underwriter, and analyst. According to traditional practices of investment banking and financial brokerage, these were serious
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1985, Alan Greenspan wrote a long letter to federal regulators in support of Charles Keating of Lincoln Savings & Loan, who had been a client of Michael Milken’s, later imprisoned for securities fraud. Greenspan had returned to his profitable economic Wall Street consultancy, Townsend-Greenspan, in 1977 after serving as President Gerald
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managers and remained so for twenty-five years. According to an estimate by Financial World magazine, Soros earned $200 million in 1987, second only to Michael Milken’s unprecedented earnings that year of $550 million. In 1992, Soros personally made $650 million, and in 1993 he made $1 billion, when such compensation
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inexplicably outsize bets that made the company liable for $80 billion should mortgage securities go bad. Cassano, a graduate of Brooklyn College and trained in Michael Milken’s junk bond department at Drexel Burnham in the 1980s, was a managerial tyrant consumed by his mini-empire and easy profits. In the 2000s
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Peters, 2007. 50 IN THE FERVOR OF THE BULL MARKET: Fortune, http://www.timewarner.com/corp/ newsroom/pr/0,20812,667526,00.html. CHAPTER 13: MICHAEL MILKEN 1 BY 1988, JUNK BONDS: Sam Ramsey Hakim and David Shimko, “The Impact of Firm’s Characteristics on Junk Bond Default,” Journal of Financial and
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Legacy,” Cincinnati Business Courier, March 4, 2005. 11 OFTEN HE BOUGHT PART OF THE OFFERING: Rudnitsky et al., “A One-Man Revolution.” 12 ONE MAN, MICHAEL MILKEN: Bruck, The Predator’s Ball, pp. 46–49. 13 BY ONE ESTIMATE IN THE LATE 1970S: Ibid., p. 54. Bruck does not provide the source
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Photo / Lennox McLendon 11.1 PAUL VOLCKER: AP Photo / Stf 12.1 TOM PETERS: Roger Ressmeyer / CORBIS 12.2 JACK WELCH: Reuters / Landov 13.1 MICHAEL MILKEN: Ed Molinari / NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images 14.1 ALAN GREENSPAN: Paul J. Richards / AFP / Getty Images 15.1 GEORGE SOROS: AP Photo
The Predators' Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the JunkBond Raiders
by Connie Bruck · 1 Jun 1989 · 507pp · 145,878 words
ARI SCHLOSSBERG Prologue: The Ball IN THE third week of March 1985, the faithful, fifteen hundred strong, came to Beverly Hills to pay homage to Michael Milken, the legendary junk-bond guru of Drexel Burnham Lambert whom many of his followers called simply “the King.” For the next four days, they would
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day, Drexel’s investment bankers had come knocking at the door. Drexel would underwrite their bonds, low-rated though they were, for the public marketplace. Michael Milken, a most extraordinary junk-bond trader, could raise $50 million, $100 million or more—the kind of long-term, relatively covenant-free capital that was
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over his aviation cap he fitted a miner’s headlamp—strapped around the back of his head, with a huge light projecting from his forehead. Michael Milken was as anomalous at the impeccably white-shoe Wall Street firm of Drexel Firestone to which he traveled each day as were the low-rated
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destined to make partner. But with his brother, at Drexel, he could utilize all he had learned at Irell and Manella and do much more. Michael Milken had been investing for his brother as well as for himself for years, and by this time the Milken assets were probably between $25 million
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those produced by Dino De Laurentiis, became a favorite shelter. According to two former Drexel partners, they believed that these shelters were so effective that Michael Milken paid relatively little in taxes. During the next several years, Lowell Milken would form a company at Drexel named Cambrent Financial Group, which would function
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Lowell’s close friend when they were growing up and had attended UC Berkeley and UCLA Law School with him, also joined and functioned as Michael Milken’s personal attorney. Cambrent would be located at Drexel—adjacent to Milken’s trading floor, in fact. But it would have no relationship to Drexel
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administrator of the empire. But he would also be his brother’s closest adviser and probably his sole confidant. His office was shouting distance from Michael Milken’s desk in the center of the trading floor. Friends of both say that Michael trusted his brother to do the equity analysis that he
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employees at Drexel to wear a beeper. But however much animus existed between group members and Lowell, no one could come between the two brothers. Michael Milken’s power did not go to his head in a way that impaired him as a salesman. Not long after he arrived in L.A
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Associates and Lobon Associates, and Lowell started a fourth, Carlyle Associates. The Milkens were the first-named partners, followed by various combinations of people in Michael Milken’s group. By the end of 1983, there were two general partnerships, for Michael and his wife, Lori (RA Partnership), and Lowell and his wife
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, and Richard Sandler was vice-president, director and shareholder. Within the next couple of years, Milow was deleted from membership and the capital contribution of Michael Milken (who was a limited partner from the beginning) rose to the category of from 50 percent to less than 75 percent. Among its other limited
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Icahn, Ronald Perelman, Sanford Sigoloff, William Farley—were all given access to pools of capital that they could only have fantasized about were there no Michael Milken. But each of them had been successful in his sphere, however much smaller—and in some instances disreputable—it may have been before they joined
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, Trafalgar had a $1 million capital-loss carryforward, and Peltz was looking for an investment to take advantage of it. Saul Steinberg introduced him to Michael Milken. “Mike and I were remembering the other day that he had come to call on me at Coffee-Mat,” said Peltz, “and we were laughing
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via the sale of junk bonds hit home with Bergerac. Bergerac didn’t know much about Drexel before Perelman’s visit, but he quickly learned. “Michael Milken is very clever,” Bergerac declared. “He has done the same thing that Delfim Netto, who was finance minister of Brazil, did there. No one would
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introduction to a new world. All the brainpower, clout and class connections that Revlon summoned were no match for the raw financial might of Drexel. Michael Milken had become the great equalizer. At the outset, it seemed to Revlon’s advisers, and to much of Wall Street, preposterous that Pantry Pride would
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made all this possible. “I’m not much given to hero worship, but I have to tell you I never thought there would be a Michael Milken. He’s someone who sees the big picture all the time—and also the small picture, down to the details. He knows so many industries
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bridge loans in an attempt to cut into his buyout and takeover business. But try as they might, what they could not do was be Michael Milken. They did not have the storehouse of knowledge about this market that he had built since his earliest infatuation with it in the sixties. Much
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. It was going to be more than bonds [also stock], and, knowing their stable, we were concerned about who the shareholders would be. I told Michael [Milken] that.” Milken accepted the compromise in Mattel. And despite his craving for every last piece of business, after Green Tree filed suit he may have
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the announcement of Boesky’s plea, the SEC issued subpoenas seeking information about trading in a dozen securities and the role in those transactions of Michael Milken, Carl Icahn, Victor Posner, Boyd Jefferies of the Los Angeles-based brokerage firm of Jefferies and Company, and others. Drexel executives knew then that their
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and others—it will be ten years before Milken’s legacy becomes clear. Takeovers, buyouts and restructurings would have occurred if there had been no Michael Milken, but it is hard to imagine that they would have occurred in the size and volume that they did. And it will take time to
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that the end justified the means, and, finally, the conceptualization of the corporate vehicle as a means of extending control nationwide—and then worldwide. The Michael Milken interviewed by this reporter displayed no hint of such rapacity. Though naturally intense, he seemed to strive for a casual manner. He was painstakingly modest
Den of Thieves
by James B. Stewart · 14 Oct 1991 · 706pp · 206,202 words
Ilan Reich, partner Lawrence Pedowitz, partner At Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, New York (counsel for Michael Milken and Dennis Levine) Arthur Liman, partner Martin Flumenbaum, partner At Williams & Connolly, Washington, D.C. (counsel for Michael Milken) Edward Bennett Williams, partner Robert Litt, partner At Cahill, Gordon & Reindel, New York (counsel for Drexel Burn
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York (counsel for Siegel; later at Fried Frank) Jed Rakoff, partner Audrey Strauss, partner At Robinson, Lake, Lerer & Montgomery, New York (public relations advisors for Michael Milken) Linda Robinson, partner Kenneth Lerer, partner At the United States attorney's office. New York Rudolph Giuliani, U.S. attorney Benito Romano, deputy to Giuliani
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he earned when he moved to Drexel from Kidder, Peabody & Co. earlier that year. The astoundingly lucrative mergers-and-acquisitions practice he was melding with Michael Milken's junk-bond money machine. The blue-chip clients, like Martin Marietta, Goodyear, and Lear Sie-gler, that were now flocking to use Drexel's
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, ineffectual Dennis Levine. In the Beverly Hills office of Drexel Burnham Lambert it was just before noon Pacific time, the peak of the trading day. Michael Milken sat at the center of a huge, X-shaped trading desk, his loyal traders and salesmen radiating out along the axes. As he avidly scanned
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, looking back on that day, Siegel realized he had been wrong. The bullet that killed Levine killed him, too. It killed Ivan Boesky. It killed Michael Milken. The same bullet shattered the takeover craze and the greatest money-making boom in Wall Street's history, and it exposed the greatest criminal conspiracy
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forfeitures and penalties; no one pretends now that that is anywhere near the total of his illegal gains over the years. And then there is Michael Milken, whose crimes were far more complex, imaginative, and ambitious than mere insider trading. In 1986, Milken earned $550 million in salary and bonus alone from
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200 employees were Jews. He was told that there were a total of three. One, Burnham said, was the man he wanted Joseph to meet: Michael Milken. Joseph shook hands with the intense, slender young man with dark, deep-set eyes. Joseph wondered briefly how someone like Milken had ever ended up
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," he advised graduates of the University of CaHfornia in 1985, coining a slogan for a decade. From his X-shaped trading desk in Beverly Hills, Michael Milken ruled a junk bond empire that, by 1986, boasted $125 billion in new issues, nearly a ninefold gain in just a decade. He was the
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he would equal or surpass in fifteen years, were becoming ever more prominent in the M&A area. But Drexel had something they didn't: Michael Milken. He could be the "edge" that Joseph was always seeking. The Posner experiences had shown how closely aligned the Milken money machine and an M
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Street Journal. "Listen to this," he said, reading one of the paper's headlines out loud as others in the office gathered. "Drexel Burnham's Michael Milken is the latest figure to be indicted in New York City's Parking Violations scandal. Although Milken has not been to Manhattan in years, his
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of being a latter-day Rothschild. So he turned again to the only person who could vault him into the front ranks of American financiers: Michael Milken. The two had been discussing ways to increase Boesky's capital for more than a year when, in the wake of the CBS and Gulf
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. Then, to the amazement of the government lawyers, Pitt ticked oflf a list of some of the most prominent names in the world of finance: Michael Milken, the junk-bond king; Martin Siegel, Drexel's star investment banker; Boyd Jeflf-eries, the prominent West Coast broker; and Carl Icahn, the corporate raider
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about Boesky. Dahl told Lowell Milken. Lowell pulled Michael off the trading desk, called him into his office, and made Dahl repeat the entire story. Michael Milken suddenly looked ashen, as if he'd seen a ghost, Dahl thought. From then on, Milken indicated, they should be careful in their dealings with
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'd known and loved had died long before. The arrival of the big-money "star" system in the eighties had made national celebrities out of Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, and Martin Siegel, even as it doomed the old-fashioned investment bankers like themselves. Looking a bit stiff in dark suits and formal
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did what he did," Joseph responded. "What we do won't have any affect on the proceedings against him. I'm not here to try Michael Milken." Joseph said his own decision was final, but he couldn't speak for the board. Perhaps he'd be voted down. Liman, abandoning the Nazi
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could buy, but he wasn't entitled to all the legal defense that money could buy. Liman was irate, telling a reporter, "The quality of Michael Milken's representation will not be affected by Drexel's nickeling and diming their lawyers." Soon Joseph was also wrangling with Milken over what he was
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others on Wall Street, Boesky has been given a cold shoulder by wealthy investors. Friends say he now realizes his notoriety precludes another financial career. Michael Milken entered the federal prison in Pleasanton, California, outside San Francisco, on March 3, 1991. He will first be considered for parole in March 1993; Judge
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in June 1991 as Portraits of the American Dream. Spurge and her organization have written letters seeking financial contributions to the Milken cause. "People like Michael Milken are living proof that compassion not greed dominated the decade," one such letter says. Martin Siegel entered the federal prison at Jessup, Georgia, on July
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a $100 million penalty to settle SEC charges of insider trading. Prosecutors reveal he has been cooperating in an undercover investigation. Drexel Burnham Lambert and Michael Milken receive subpoenas. February 1987 Levine is sentenced to two years in prison. February 1987 Robert Freeman, Richard Wigton, and Timothy Tabor are arrested on insider
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Milken sentencing memo, pp. 79-82. page 188 The Milken-Boesky recordkeeping scheme was first described in James B. Stewart and Daniel Hertzberg, "Drexel's Michael Milken Called a Focus of Probe of Suspected Boesky Scheme," Wall Street Journal, Feb. 5, 1987. Milken has consistently denied the existence of a recordkeeping scheme
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Milken's motive was to induce Solomon to purchase securities sold by Drexel. "We steadfastly dispute that assignment of motive and any other suggestion that Michael Milken improperly induced [Solomon] to do business with Drexel. [Solomon] did business with Drexel because Drexel was the principal market maker and underwriter of high yield
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California Representative Tony Coelho. pages 399-400 Milken's public-relations campaign aimed at blacks is the subject of Mary G. Gotschall, "The Machine Behind Michael Milken," Regardies, January 1991. page 401 The fight for RJR Nabisco is the subject of Bryan Burrough and John Helyar's best-selling Barbarians at the
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Angeles Times article, 148 Lowell Milken's aversion to, 101-2 marriage of, 35 Martin Siegel and, see Siegel, Martin A. MGM deal and, 185 Michael Milken and, see Milken, Michael mother of, 147 net capital requirements and, 177-78, 461rt net worth of, 281-82 new office of, 145-46 penalties
Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street
by William Poundstone · 18 Sep 2006 · 389pp · 109,207 words
Samuelson • The Random Walk Cosa Nostra • This Is Not the Time to Buy Stocks • IPO • Bet Your Beliefs • Beat the Market • James Regan • Resorts International • Michael Milken • Robert C. Merton • Man vs. Machine • Why Money Managers Are No Good • Enemies List • Widows and Orphans PART FOUR: ST. PETERSBURG WAGER Daniel Bernoulli • Nature
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. The important thing was that the broker be someone of unquestioned honesty and discretion. Regan found someone who seemed just about perfect. His name was Michael Milken. Michael Milken IN HIS OWN WAY, Milken founded his career on the less-than-perfect efficiency of the market. As a Berkeley business student, Milken came across
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attorney brother, Lowell, who had an office in the same Beverly Hills building and who handled Michael’s legal affairs. Thorp’s closest approach to Michael Milken, however, was seeing him across Drexel’s Beverly Hills trading floor—behind a pane of glass. In the early 1970s, Steve Ross and Caesar Kimmel
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the stock issued, limiting ownership to the few biggest shareholders. To get the necessary money, Warner Communications would have to issue junk bonds. Ross asked Michael Milken for advice. Milken devised a plan and met with Ross in New York to discuss it. Milken explained that Ross would have to give up
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said nothing because no one in Congress had thought of stripping treasury bonds at the time the laws were written. Regan took the idea to Michael Milken. Milken thought it was great. A wealthy investor with a million dollars’ worth of capital gains had only to buy $1.1 million worth of
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weddings, bar mitzvahs, and funerals. They would rather go to jail than violate the code of silence. Giuliani’s people came to the conclusion that Michael Milken was the most important person in the diagram. Milken was a node in the social network, and his power was then at its height. He
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the understanding that he would buy it back with 20 percent interest. Concealing a Drexel financial interest in Mattel suggested a conflict of interest, for Michael Milken was then helping Mattel to recapitalize. Drexel had also been doing a convertible bond offering for a Minneapolis company called C.O.M.B. that
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leave unless I’m sure that the right person succeeds me.” Giuliani’s biggest concern was that the Wall Street investigation would fall apart. Convicting Michael Milken was to be his crowning achievement as U.S. Attorney. As long as Giuliani’s successor followed through, Giuliani could point to the achievement for
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for the government in two other continuing investigations. “You’d have to be a fool,” Grand said, not to know that he was talking about Michael Milken and Robert Freeman. Giuliani later told The Wall Street Journal that he had not made any such offer. Defense attorney Jack Arsenault also claimed that
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photo of Rudy Giuliani. “When half the leadership of your firm is convicted,” Thorp told Business Week, “it doesn’t help any.” In March 1989, Michael Milken was indicted under RICO on racketeering and securities fraud charges. A year later, he admitted guilt on six felony charges, paid a $600 million fine
Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business
by Anastasia Nesvetailova and Ronen Palan · 28 Jan 2020 · 218pp · 62,889 words
the qualities John Tuld lists to his board that seems to ensure really big money. THE KING OF JUNK In the early 1980s a certain Michael Milken invented what became known as the ‘junk bond’; or, more elegantly, the high-yield bond. Junk bonds are considered among the most important innovations in
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twentieth-century finance. Their creator, Michael Milken, would be widely celebrated by the industry. Eventually Milken’s efforts would afford him residency of an exclusive gated community in California, better known as
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some $2.2tn. In 2016 nearly $237bn of new high-yield securities were issued in the US.9 LEWIE RANIERI, MBS AND SECURITIZATION10 Just as Michael Milken was turning himself into a ‘king of junk’, another legendary character, Lewie Ranieri, a bright visionary at Salomon Brothers, spotted an opportunity in the bond
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even several such products, that transforms an economy, but ‘the carrying out of new combinations’ that works as the key driver of economic change.29 Michael Milken, Lewie Ranieri and Blythe Masters became celebrities in the world of finance and beyond. Their names feature in financial bestsellers and popular culture. But rarely
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Raised More Than $1 Billion, Report Claims’, 19 May 2018, www.ccn.com/ico-scams-have-raised-more-than-1-billion-report-claims. Cohan, W., ‘Michael Milken invented the modern junk bond, went to prison, and then became one of the most respected people on Wall Street’, Business Insider, 2 May 2017
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, http://uk.businessinsider.com/michael-milken-life-story-2017-5?r=US&IR=T. Cohan, William D., House of Cards: How Wall Street’s Gamblers Broke Capitalism, Allen Lane, 2009, pp
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Press, 2013. 4. ‘Stars of the Junkyard’, Economist, 21 October 2010, www.economist.com/briefing/2010/10/21/stars-of-the-junkyard. 5. W. Cohan, ‘Michael Milken invented the modern junk bond, went to prison, and then became one of the most respected people on Wall Street’, Business Insider, 2 May 2017
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-story-2017-5?r=US&IR=T. 6. ‘Stars of the Junkyard’, Economist. 7. Cohan, ‘Michael Milken invented the modern junk bond’. 8. ‘Stars of the Junkyard’, Economist. 9. Cohan, ‘Michael Milken invented the modern junk bond’. 10. Insights for this section come from the best story written about the role of Ranieri personally
Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception
by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller and Stanley B Resor Professor Of Economics Robert J Shiller · 21 Sep 2015 · 274pp · 93,758 words
CHAPTER SEVEN Innovation: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly 96 CHAPTER EIGHT Tobacco and Alcohol 103 CHAPTER NINE Bankruptcy for Profit 117 CHAPTER TEN Michael Milken Phishes with Junk Bonds as Bait 124 CHAPTER ELEVEN The Resistance and Its Heroes 136 PART THREE Conclusion and Afterword CONCLUSION: EXAMPLES AND GENERAL LESSONS
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alcohol abuse, are huge threats to our well-being. For many, many people, those threats are realized. Chapter 9: Bankruptcy for Profit, and Chapter 10: Michael Milken Phishes with Junk Bonds as Bait. We will revisit financial markets. We will see, from the US savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s
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the advice of Hill and Knowlton to do the next best thing. They created doubt. Just as we will see in chapter 10 that financier Michael Milken realized that the public would have a difficult time differentiating between two types of “junk bonds,” the tobacco industry saw that the public would, likewise
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expansion of the market for junk bonds, which underlay hostile takeovers of even the largest firms—previously deemed impossible. TEN Michael Milken Phishes with Junk Bonds as Bait The work of one man, Michael Milken, in the 1970s and 1980s changed the face of US finance forever. No longer could corporate executives of large
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place: in an obscure 1958 book in a University of California–Berkeley library. The discoverer, an undergraduate business major from the Los Angeles suburbs, was Michael Milken. The book was Corporate Bond Quality and Investor Experience, by W. Braddock Hickman. The 536-page table-filled book was a highly technical report on
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are underwritten by institutions whose reputations are being mined. Maybe junk bonds would have remained the same thing as they had been before 1943, absent Michael Milken. But that was not the case. The cognitive mistake exploited by Milken is described in Gary Smith’s 2014 book Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured
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than the legally required capital. Or one could also beat the average by taking over a firm whose management was incompetent, and replacing it. For Michael Milken and his propaganda machine and trading desk, the bonds issued in such raids could be a huge source of supply of bonds. There might be
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takeover wave of the early to mid-1980s: far distant from their S&L/insurance-company phishing home base.36 Observation 5. The operations of Michael Milken demonstrate the forces leading to phishing equilibrium. Using our previous analogy, when he reached the “checkout counter” after his graduation from Wharton, he noticed opportunities
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. 26. Steve Brown, “City Review: Dallas,” National Real Estate Investor News, June 1985, pp. 98–100. 27. Pizzo, Fricker, and Muolo, Inside Job. Chapter Ten: Michael Milken Phishes with Junk Bonds as Bait 1. Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco (New York: Random House
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Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics (New York: Duckworth Overlook, 2014). 9. Jesse Kornbluth, Highly Confident: The Crime and Punishment of Michael Milken (New York: William Morrow, 1992), p. 45. 10. Hickman, Corporate Bond Quality and Investor Experience, p. 10. 11. Jeremy J. Siegel and Richard H. Thaler
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B. Stewart, Den of Thieves (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), pp. 521–22; and Benjamin Stein, A License to Steal: The Untold Story of Michael Milken and the Conspiracy to Bilk the Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). 14. Kornbluth, Highly Confident, p. 64. Later, Drexel was able to raise
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://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/goldman-sachs-and-abacus-2007-ac1-a-look-beyond-the-numbers/. Kornbluth, Jesse. Highly Confident: The Crime and Punishment of Michael Milken. New York: William Morrow, 1992. Kotler, Philip, and Gary Armstrong. Principles of Marketing. 14th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2010. Kotz, David. Investigation
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7, 2005. Accessed November 16, 2014. http://clerk.house.gov/member_info/electionInfo/2004election.pdf. Stein, Benjamin. A License to Steal: The Untold Story of Michael Milken and the Conspiracy to Bilk the Nation. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. Stern, Mark Joseph. “The FDA’s New Cigarette Labels Go Up in
Liar's Poker
by Michael Lewis · 1 Jan 1989 · 314pp · 101,452 words
's bid could easily be seen as a hate bomb lobbed at John Gutfreund by Drexel's junk bond king, and Perelman's true backer, Michael Milken. Milken often lobbed hate bombs at people who treated him badly. And Gutfreund had treated him badly. In early 1985 Milken had visited our offices
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to collect your jacket." The defections to Drexel were, not surprisingly, self-perpetuating. Reports of the magical sums of money to be made working for Michael Milken trickled back into Salomon and made us drool. One Salomon middle executive left to join Milken in Beverly Hills in 1986. In his third month
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just want to let you know how happy we are with the job you are doing." Another former Salomonite told of his first bonus with Michael Milken. Milken handed him several million dollars more than he expected. He had grown accustomed to Salomon Brothers' bonus sessions, where he had rarely got more
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was. My friend and others with him told me that Milken was worth more than a billion dollars. Still, you had to wonder what gave Michael Milken greater pleasure, making a billion dollars or watching Gutfreund squirm as one of his biggest clients, Ronald Perelman, stalked Salomon Brothers. "I know Michael, and
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. Ironically, the new winners were just those men helping Ronald Perelman in his bid to buy us: Milken, Wasserstein, and Perella. Drexel Burnham, thanks to Michael Milken, had replaced us as Wall Street's most profitable investment bank in 1986. It had cleared $545.5 million on revenues of $4 billion, more
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rickety companies deeply in hock, and the number of investors willing to risk their principal (and perhaps also their principles) by lending to these companies. Michael Milken at Drexel created that market, by persuading investors that junk bonds were a smart bet, in much the same fashion that Lewie Ranieri persuaded investors
…
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
…
leaders in corporate take-overs and, coincidentally, the other two men who helped Ronald Perelman chase Salomon Brothers.) Here the similarity ends. For unlike Ranieri, Michael Milken took complete control of his firm. He moved his junk bond operation from New York to Beverly Hills and eventually paid himself $550 million a
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driving them. OOOOhhhhhhh yeaahhhh." Most of his thoughts were entirely devoted to finding the next trade. His was a never-ending search for a fix. Michael Milken, who began in a job not dissimilar to Dash's, was building a business, rather than making an endless series of trades. He was willing
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ownership in a shaky enterprise means control, for when a company fails to meet its interest payments, a bondholder can foreclose and liquidate the company. Michael Milken explained this more succinctly to Meshulam Riklis, thede facto owner of Rapid-American Corporation, at a breakfast meeting in the late 1970s. Milken claimed that
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any bond salesman, 1 ike me, weary of screwing investors on behalf of corporate borrowers. // you miss one payment, we'll take the company away. "Michael Milken," Dash Riprock said, "has turned the business inside out. He screws the corporate borrower on behalf of investors." Borrowers were squeezed because they had nowhere
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hands together in glee. He had left Salomon in the middle of 1987 and, like many other Salomon bond experts, had gone to work with Michael Milken in Beverly Hills. Herein, funnily enough, lies one of the chief reasons why Salomon Brothers did not rush into the junk bond market when the
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the bonds of the most stable companies to junk: leveraged corporate take-overs. Having attracted tens of billions of dollars to his new speculative market, Michael Milken, by 1985, was faced with more money than places to put it. It must have been awkward for him. He simply could not find enough
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, not that anyone on Wall Street wasted any time trying to explain it. To the men in Wall Street's small mergers and acquisitions departments, Michael Milken was a godsend, a vindication of their choice of careers. Joe Perella at First Boston, having started the M&A department in 1973 and hired
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who for so long had viewed money as the measure of success were bound to envy not only Perelman but Wasserstein, Perella, and Milken. Especially Michael Milken. The question of the day on 41 was: How come he makes a billion dollars and I don't? This question drives us right to
Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent
by Harvey Silverglate · 6 Jun 2011 · 389pp · 136,320 words
child pornography, despite the fact that child porn is illegal even to possess (“contraband”) and therefore holding, rather than destroying it, arguably would be criminal. Michael Milken, under threat that the Department of Justice would prosecute his younger brother if the older brother did not take a plea bargain, pled guilty in
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. There and only there is the “truth” written, or perhaps composed. chapter four Following (or Harassing?) the Money I think often of the prosecution of Michael Milken, the financial genius and guiding star of the brokerage firm of Drexel, Burnham & Lambert. Milken and his firm flowered in the 1970s and ’80s when
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charges for conduct (admitted to by Milken) that, to informed and objective observers, did not appear to constitute crimes. 98 Following (or Harassing?) the Money Michael Milken’s pioneering development of higher-risk, higher-yield corporate bonds (dubbed “junk bonds” by his detractors) gave birth to some of the most important start
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case in the press. The staunchly conservative, pro-business Wall Street Journal three felonies a day 113 editorial page, which virtually alone had earlier championed Michael Milken, was likewise supportive of Quattrone and used his Second Circuit reversal to drive home the lesson: juries can fairly decide these corporate fraud cases, editorialized
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first people I consulted about the viability of this project and who urged me unequivocally to proceed with it. Richard Sandler, friend and lawyer to Michael Milken, with whom I worked on that extraordinary case, and whose generosity with his time and insights is much appreciated. Jennifer Schneider, M.D., who spent
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and considerably scrappier Washington lawyer Edward Bennett Williams, who died of cancer before Milken was indicted. 3. 4. Daniel Fischel, Payback: The Conspiracy to Destroy Michael Milken and His Financial Revolution (New York: HarperBusiness, 1995). Material and analyses from Professor Fischel’s book have proven invaluable in corroborating and supplementing portions of
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as a fraud or deceit upon any person, in connection with the purchase or sale of any security. Daniel Fischel, Payback: The Conspiracy to Destroy Michael Milken and His Financial Revolution (New York: HarperBusiness, 1995) 57-58. 25. 26. Id. at 59. Michael McMenamin, “St. Martha: Why Martha Stewart should go to
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