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The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. (Hardcover)
by William D. Cohan
| Category:
Wall Street, Investment banking, Financial history, History |
| Market price: ¥ 318.00
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¥ 288.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
Heir to the "Barbarians At The Gate" throne, this extraordinarily researched saga of Wall Street exactly captures the feel of the place. |
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Author: William D. Cohan
Publisher: Doubleday
Pub. in: April, 2007
ISBN: 0385514514
Pages: 752
Measurements: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.8 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA01029
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0385514514
Language: American English
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- Awards & Credential -
Winner of FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. #1 seller in Banks & Banking category on Amazon.com as of October 26, 2007. |
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- MSL Picks -
Cohan has brought to life a vivid and spellbinding tale of the legendary giants in the investment banking field (Meyer, Rohatyn, David-Weill, Rattner, and Wasserstein) at Lazard, offering a compelling and revealing portrait of the relentless personalities that invented, dominated and defined the last few decades of M&A banking. At the same time, The Last Tycoons is, at its core, a saga of ambition, egotism, greed, vanity and pride of Shakespearean proportions played out on the grand stage of corporate takeovers and national politics.
What emerges is not a noble picture of what these ostensibly "Great Men" purported themselves to be. Instead, it is apparent that at Lazard, the black arts of power and greed were the currency used to exhort and extort men of high ambition and intellect to achieve stature and enormous fees. The long shadow of Andre Meyer (unquestionably a Sith Lord) looms over the Lazard partnership and his protégés and successors, Felix Rohatyn and Michel David-Weill. Meyer was a brilliant financier with no peer with the exception of Bruce Wasserstein and it's fitting and deserving that the story of Lazard begins and ends with these two men. In between, Michel and Felix weave a complex and fascinating legacy of fear and loathing in the intervening decades.
For bankers and professionals in the field, Cohan's detail and emotional and psychological nuances will be tantalizing and relevant. For those aspiring to enter the field, it's a cautionary tale - it's very hard to play on the big stage on Wall St without darkening your soul. This story is destined to be a classic amongst Barbarians and Den of Thieves.
(From quoting C. Wu, USA)
Target readers:
Investment bankers, Wall Street fans, other financial workers, MBAs, and academics.
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WILLIAM D. COHAN, a former award-winning investigative newspaper reporter in Raleigh, North Carolina, worked on Wall Street for seventeen years. He spent six years at Lazard Frères in New York and later became a managing director at JP Morgan Chase. He lives in New York City and Columbia County, New York.
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From Publisher
A grand and revelatory portrait of Wall Street’s most storied investment bank
Wall Street investment banks move trillions of dollars a year, make billions in fees, pay their executives in the tens of millions of dollars. But even among the most powerful firms, Lazard Frères & Co. stood apart. Discretion, secrecy, and subtle strategy were its weapons of choice. For more than a century, the mystique and reputation of the "Great Men" who worked there allowed the firm to garner unimaginable profits, social cachet, and outsized influence in the halls of power. But in the mid-1980s, their titanic egos started getting in the way, and the Great Men of Lazard jeopardized all they had built.
William D. Cohan, himself a former high-level Wall Street banker, takes the reader into the mysterious and secretive world of Lazard and presents a compelling portrait of Wall Street through the tumultuous history of this exalted and fascinating company. Cohan deconstructs the explosive feuds between Felix Rohatyn and Steve Rattner, superstar investment bankers and pillars of New York society, and between the man who controlled Lazard, the inscrutable French billionaire Michel David-Weill, and his chosen successor, Bruce Wasserstein.
Cohan follows Felix, the consummate adviser, as he reshapes corporate America in the 1970s and 1980s, saves New York City from bankruptcy, and positions himself in New York society and in Washington. Felix’s dreams are dashed after the arrival of Steve, a formidable and ambitious former newspaper reporter. By the mid-1990s, as Lazard neared its 150th anniversary, Steve and Felix were feuding openly.
The internal strife caused by their arguments could not be solved by the imperious Michel, whose manipulative tendencies served only to exacerbate the trouble within the firm. Increasingly desperate, Michel took the unprecedented step of relinquishing operational control of Lazard to one of the few Great Men still around, Bruce Wasserstein, then fresh from selling his own M&A boutique, for $1.4 billion. Bruce’s take: more than $600 million. But it turned out Great Man Bruce had snookered Great Man Michel when the Frenchman was at his most vulnerable.
The LastTycoons is a tale of vaulting ambitions, whispered advice, worldly mistresses, fabulous art collections, and enormous wealth - a story of high drama in the world of high finance.
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Even among the great Wall Street firms - Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch - Lazard Frères & Co. stood apart, explicitly priding itself on being different from, and superior to, its competitors. For 157 years, Lazard had punched above its weight. Unlike other Wall Street banks, it competed with intellectual rather than financial capital and through a hard-won tradition of privacy and independence. Its strategy, put simply, was to offer clients the wisdom of its Great Men, the finest and most experienced collection of investment bankers the world had ever known. They risked no capital, offering only the raw Darwinian power of their ideas. The better the idea, and the insights and tactics required to achieve the result contemplated by it, the greater was Lazard’s currency as a valued and trusted adviser - and the larger were the piles of money the Great Men hauled out of the firm and into their swelling bank accounts. The lucky few men - yes, always men - at Wall Street’s summit have always been portrayed as ambitious and brilliant on the one hand and unscrupulous and ruthless on the other. But the secret history of Lazard Frères & Co., the world’s most elite and enigmatic investment bank, twists parts of this conventional wisdom into knots of unfathomable complexity. The Great Men chronicled herein amassed huge fortunes - to be sure - but they refused to admit to anyone, least of all to themselves, that their pursuit of these riches led to relentless infighting. Instead they spoke, without irony, of being part of a Florentine guild and of advice whispered to heads of state and to CEOs of the world’s most powerful corporations, while all the time attempting to preserve the mythical special idea that was Lazard. They also, to a person, craved an equally elusive chimera: the assurance that somehow, despite everything, they alone had remained virtuous.
But starting in the mid-1980s, the wisdom of Lazard’s Great Men strategy began to show its considerable age, especially when Lazard was compared with its better capitalized and more powerful and nimble foes. The firm’s numerous strategic missteps were exacerbated by the increasingly titanic generational struggle inside Lazard between the likes of Felix Rohatyn and Steve Rattner - superstar investment bankers and pillars of New York society - as well as by the bizarre behavior of the increasingly isolated and bitter Michel David-Weill, the French billionaire who controlled Lazard and fomented the struggle from his imperial lair. And at the climactic moment, Bruce Wasserstein, the supreme opportunist, came along to pick Michel’s considerable pockets. The decades of internal turmoil and paternalistic management led ultimately to the once-unthinkable: a Lazard Frères free from its founders, as a publicly traded company just like any other, its operational flaws and obscene profitability open to the world - its special cachet lost forever.
The story of Lazard has always been one of internecine warfare, calamity, and resurrection, proving definitively that the forces of “creative destruction” - in the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s famous observation - are alive and well to this day in American capitalism.
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Of all Lazard’s Great Men, none was greater than Felix George Rohatyn. Felix was considered by many to be the world’s preeminent investment banker. He was the man who saved, first, Wall Street and then New York City from financial ruin in the early 1970s. For some thirty years at the end of the twentieth century, he had unofficially presided over Lazard Frères, helping to transform it into Wall Street’s most prestigious, enigmatic, and mysterious investment banking partnership. But on one of those impossibly close days in our nation’s capital, in the summer of 1997, Rohatyn found himself at the end of his tenure at Lazard, testifying before a Senate subcommittee in hopes of obtaining ratification of his appointment to a position he had long maintained was beneath him.
“It is a great honor for me to appear before you today to seek your consent to President Clinton’s nomination of me to serve as the next American Ambassador to France,” the sixty-nine-year-old Felix told the Subcommittee on European Affairs of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “It is also a very emotional experience, for many reasons… I am, as you know, a refugee who came to this country from Nazi-occupied Europe in 1942. As long as I can remember, going back to those very dark days, being an American was my dream. I was fortunate to achieve that dream, and America has more than fulfilled all of my expectations. To represent, at this time, my adopted country as her Ambassador would be the culmination of my career; to have been nominated to represent my country in France, a country where I spent part of my childhood and with which I have had a lifelong relationship, both professional and personal, seems to me more than I could ever have hoped for.”
In truth, the thick-browed, beaver-toothed Felix had for more than twenty years campaigned relentlessly for more, much more. With absolute clarity of mind, he knew he deserved better than an ambassadorship, a position he once likened to that of butler. Felix was the Great Man of Lazard, Le Corbusier of the most important mergers and acquisitions, or M&A, deals of the second half of the twentieth century, the ultimate rainmaker and corporate confidant, who year after year single-handedly generated hundreds of millions of dollars in fees for himself and his partners, thereby controlling his colleagues through a delicious combination of fear and greed.
After all, who could possibly afford to disobey a man who put so much money into his partners’ pockets while taking far less than he was entitled to? When Felix called or wandered through Lazard’s spartan offices in One Rockefeller Center, his partners snapped to attention, dropped whatever they might be doing, and acceded to his every wish. As his deal-making prowess continued unabated over the years, he had somehow also found the energy to volunteer his precious time and incomparable insights to solve two of this country’s major financial crises of the second half of the twentieth century. |
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Publishers Weekly (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-26 00:00>
This astute if not entirely cohesive debut account from investigative journalist and former banker Cohan chronicles the long metamorphosis of Lazard Frères. Converted from a private partnership to a diversified, publicly traded company in 2005, it was the last great American investment bank to do so. That story intertwines with the career of Felix Rohatyn, Lazard's most famous and influential banker. Readers expecting a comprehensive financial history in the style of Ron Chernow (The House of Morgan) will find the firm's history from its founding as a New Orleans dry goods retailer in 1848 to the early 1960s covered in only two of the 21 chapters. Cohan discusses the following quarter century in more detail, but concentrates almost exclusively on Rohatyn and draws on the general business press. The chapters on the last 20 years contain fascinating and novel information, and rely extensively on the author's personal recollections (he worked at Lazard for six years) and interviews with associates, many of whom remain undisclosed. The result is three incompletely integrated works: a competent history of Lazard, a well-written biography of Rohatyn and an exciting insider's account of Wall Street infighting. |
Bachelier (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-26 00:00>
Cohan's "The Last Tycoons" is a wonderful romp in the basement of ego, superego, and id, where those with money act out fantasies on a grand scale as no adolescent ever could. Cohan's thesis is that these aren't people to admire, these are people with issues (and no, I don't mean issues of bonds).
Serial philanders are the least of the deadly sins chronicled here: lust, avarice, wrath, jealousy, gluttony, pride... only one missing is sloth... these people do keep moving and on a global scale.
Murder & kinky S&M are the real juicy bits for the groundlings crowd of financial spectators, with the chapter on partner Edouard Stern's sad bizarre demise in a latex fantasy that did not involve revolvers. Other partners often questioned why Stern's mistress was not as attractive as his check book would normally command. Mystery solved once Stern's tastes were revealed in death.
Stern's most famous quote is "The one thing I detest is incompetence." Stern didn't really live up to his own standards, since he radically mispriced the risk of his mistress, Cécile Brossard, offing him over a dispute about money he froze away from her control. Frosting on the incompetence cupcake is that Stern was dressed in the most inglorious outfit possible when Brossard shot him four times (imagine Leslie Nielson and Priscilla Presley in the giant comic full-body condoms for the gag in the Naked Gun movie and you get the picture). Stern was no financial genius either, inheriting most of his wealth when his family disposed of Stern Bank. Given that he died over a dispute about a paltry one million dollars, and Brossard was his mistress for less than four years, the evidence is overwhelming. Stern was clueless. Fifty weekends times four equals 200, and $1,000,000 divided by same equals Stern paying about $5,000 per spanking.
The power struggle between Rohatyn, Rattner, Loomis, and David-Weill is the real meat for bankers and finance types, as the sex-and money dramatic dyad is dull for most jaded deal makers. The entrance stage left of Bruce Wasserstein is the rising curtain in the final act. Raider? The acolyte who stabs the high priest? Sneak thief? Saviour? Cohan has his views, but enough is left open to let the reader decide.
There will be a conflict of appreciation between general curious readers and financial specialists and Wall Streeters. The book includes deal details that will give the superficially interested in money the MEGLO effect. but will be pure gold for young bankers and those who were on other points of the information dispersion cloud during the formation of the transactions. Basically, for insiders, these are the best parts, for outsiders, these will be the most tedious.
Of course, readers of this book are "A" list, and every luxury goods sales department wishes they had their names. It will be interesting to see what recommendation vectors pop up from purchasers with 10021 ZCTAs.
Salciously delicious in only the way that sex and ego and money can be. But Cohan can kiss being able to get tables in some restos "goodbye" now. Probably me too with this review. C'est la vie. |
B. Jones (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-26 00:00>
Maybe the first casualty of wealth is self-knowledge. that is the takeaway from William Cohan's fine history of the fabled lazard freres banking house. in these pages we watch titans of finance gloat and preen while their castle crumbles from corruption and mismanagement.
Its a terrific story peopled with fascinating characters. who wouldn't, after reading this book, want to dine with the formidable felix rohatyn. He fled the Nazis as a boy, rescued New York from financial ruin and ditched Lazard at just the right moment to serve the nation as Bill Clinton's Ambassador to France. His intellect and achievement dominate the book, just as Felix dominated wall street for a generation. His departure from the firm caps the end of "the great man" era in investment banking. In Rohatyn's day only a select handful of wise men could be trusted to guide transactions. Nowadays all you need is armani and a spread sheet.
Even as he maps the tectonic movement in investment banking, Cohan keeps it light with plenty of well-researched dish on criminal investigations, love affairs, fabulous art collections, New Yorkana and the occasional drop to earth by some of Lazard's wax-winged partners. I closed the book - a whopping 750 pp's - edified and thoroughly entertained. |
A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-26 00:00>
When Bill, an old friend, told me he was writing a book about Lazard, I thought, "Who will care?" I was ignorant. My only obligation was to buy the book, not to read it. Even if I had not known the author, I would not have been able to put this book down. Writing is a lonely pursuit, and the endless thought and organization, the hundreds of interviews on both sides of the Atlantic, the researching and re-drafting, all make the author's dedication, and the reader's, worthwhile.
Lazard was truly the first global Wall Street firm. Andre Meyer, the brilliant global pioneer, comes to life. Felix Rohatyn, away from the deserved platitudes, is complex; Michel David-Weill Machiavellian. Bruce Wasserstein, prototypically capitalist, can exist only on Wall Street. Steve Rattner alone comes across as someone for whom an investment banker would want to work. The rudderless leadership for decades, the infighting among the partners, the lack of organizational cohesion all bar the firm from the top tier. The extraordinary access Cohan had to the principals and many others suggest there was much to tell. Cohan's natural wit and cynicism spice the story.
Some have criticized the author for using secondary sources. As one who did not read many of those articles, I was delighted he included them. That Wasserstein alone did not cooperate further excuses Cohan from consulting secondary sources to complete the tale. |
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