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The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co.
written by William D. Cohan
Studio : Doubleday
by Doubleday
Release Date : 2007-04-03
Publisher : Doubleday
Released : 2007-04-03
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 9780385514514
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 24 reviews)
List Price : $29.95
Our Price : $9.99
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Product Description |
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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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From a different age |
With extensive access to all players involved (except one, who declined to be interviewed) William D Cohan does a marvelous job in recounting the history of a bank from another time and the history of investment banking right into the 1990s.
When reading the book I could not escape the feeling that Lazard was almost run like a personal fiefdom of the David-Weills with a few `stars' like Andre Meyer and Felix Rohatyn allowed to drive the business and take their cut along the way without ever questioning the authority of the owner. The bank has done quite well out of this arrangement, but this set-up has made it near impossible to run the bank in a `normal-managed' way. Michel David-Weill's attempts to install a General Manager were always doomed to fail because he would have had to relinquish authority he was unwilling to give up. William D Cohan shows how he drove one after the other `Managing Partner' round the bend if not into the nuthouse. Bruce Wasserstein appears to have got the better of the owners by turning the bank into a `normal' bank. Whether this was a good deed you have to decide for yourself. I thought the bank both gained and lost at the same time.
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A decent read but falls far short as economic history |
There is much that is interesting in this detailed story of Lazard, the enigmatic Wall Street M&A advisory firm. However despite the plaudits the book has received (e.g. FT business book of the year for 2007, beating our Alan Greenspan's autobiography), it falls far short of the great Wall Street histories in the tradition of Ron Chernow (on the Morgans) or Niall Ferguson (on the Rothschilds). Cohan is a decent storyteller, but in the end this long narrative fails to do a number of things:
1) Gain more insight into what Lazard bankers actually did. We hear repeatedly about Rohatyn's endless deals but never get a good sense of how he sold the business, what those deals entailed, and what his bankers actually did to earn their enormous fees. In particular I would have liked to learn more about how the nature of M&A advisory work has evolved over the past 50 years (Cohan talks about the 'spreadsheet revolution', but never goes into any detail).
2) Keep the international thread. He starts with a cross-Atlantic perspective with the story of founding of Lazard in France, but following Andre Meyer's move to NY during World War II, he drops the narrative of the British and French firms, only returning to them in passing towards the end of the book. It seems somewhat arbitrary to ignore those Lazards entirely.
3) Talk more about the industry. Cohan is clearly captivated by the big personalities like Meyer and Rohatyn, or scandals like ITT, but he fails to talk much about how the investment banking industry evolves in the post-war period and how other Wall Street firms grew alongside Lazard.
4) The Jewish angle. There are oblique references to Lazard's Jewish roots and identity, and occasionally to issues with anti-semitism that came up with employees and competitors, but Cohan never addresses head-on just what the firm's Jewish identity meant (if anything) and how it differentiated Lazard from the so-called blue-blooded firms.
5) Most importantly, make the case for why we should care. Why does Lazards justify a 750page history in the first place? Cohan seems to think there was something special or unusual about the firm but never really makes the argument for what made this any different from dozens of investment banks and hundreds of finance businesses.
In the end, although there are elements of criticism in the book, it reads too much like an authorized corporate history and lacks much real insight into the the history of American banking. Anyone interested in the latter might spend his or her time better elsewhere. |
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Lazard Freres & Co. Who would have thought it would be revealed! |
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The book reads like a novel with fascinating histories of one of the most secretive and successful of Wall Street's investment firms. The characters are well known to everyone on Wall Street starting with Felix Rohatyn, Andre Meyer, Michel David-Weills, Steve Rattner and then none other than Bruce Wasserstein. What has not been well known about the internal working relationships of the partners is revealed in wonderful detail for the first time by an insider who captures personalities dealing with greed and power as well as personal triumphs and shortcomings. As one who has been involved with matters of client investments and Wall Street for nearly 50 years, I found the book immensely interesting and revealing in ways truly unexpected. |
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A big long book displaying the limitless greed and power seeking at Lazard |
If you are interested in the story of Lazard Frères & Co. from its founding to its current incarnation as a public firm run by Bruce Wasserstein, this is your book. William D. Cohan worked at Lazard for six years and got to know the stories and the key people. He has done his research and provides insights about the leaders and top rainmakers of the company. This is a book more about people than deals. The author uses the deals to illustrate aspects of the person being discussed. Even when deals are being discussed, the actual business details are kept to a minimum. This is probably wise since only finance people would be able to follow a truly technical discussion of the logic and means of the M&A activity Lazard specializes in.
This book gets quite personal about the lives of the men this book focuses on and the big names do not come across very well. Beyond their personal peccadilloes with women other than their wives, they are also vain, petty, vicious, greedy beyond measure, and disloyal to anyone and anything but a fee. Some of the betrayals and vendettas described in this book are shocking. The lesson to take away from these stories is that you have to realize the kind of folks you are dealing with when you are dealing with this level of investment banker and never assume anything, never do anything on trust, and understand that they are going to do precisely what is in their self-interest even if it means betraying you. Now, I am not saying every investment banker is like this, but so many of them are that you have to protect yourself by acting as if all of them are.
The business of investment banking as practiced by Lazard, giving of advice rather than supplying capital, also comes across poorly. It seems to be full of self-dealing, puffery, outright deception, insider trading, betrayal, compromised ethics, and many other sins that are justified by the millions upon tens of millions of dollars they make. Their treatment of their employees, especially female employees, is shockingly atavistic and justified because the underlings getting misused will learn to make millions by being around these "great men". The egos are so outsized that no amount of self-justification seems to be beyond them.
Lazard, until Wasserstein, was really three companies. They were in New York, Paris, and London with a number of branch offices. However, it had been run by Europeans for most of the 20th Century and their outlook and way of doing things was quite intricate, secretive, and without a hint of a need to do something because it was right (at least as how it is described in this book). Oh, there is a lot of talk and public posturing about being pure and moral, but behind Oz's curtain it was very different as the lawsuits, investigations, fines, and other facts demonstrate. Again, it was and remains all about the money. As the old saying goes, "It isn't really about the money; it's about the amount of money."
Look, I don't know these men. I have never met any of them. I don't know what they are really like. Maybe the author has painted them very different than they really are. However, there seems to be so much evidence, so many witnesses, so much now out in the open, that what is provided here in this book seems pretty convincing. This is a long book, but if you are interested in getting into this rats nest, Cohan has provided a tour of the nest and a handbook about the lives of the king rats.
One little side note. I have often warned people not to confuse rich businessmen with being capitalists, conservatives, free market types, or even Republicans. Well, these bankers call themselves capitalists and that makes some sense because of the way they pursue profit (even without risking capital). However, readers of this book will note that these bankers were ALL power players in the Democratic Party. Regulation and favorable laws suit them and their industry well. They use government power to protect themselves from competitors and to gain special treatment for themselves and their clients. So, do NOT confuse these people with being free market conservatives. They are much closer to a privately managed socialism with themselves as the string pullers and profiteers. However, it also suits them to let people vent their anger about greedy bankers against the political party they oppose.
I do wonder why the book had NO pictures of the key players, places, or things discussed in the book. Maybe the author and publisher decided we could all find what interested us on the Internet. However, I would have preferred some photos in the book.
Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI
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interesting, thorough but a little insider-ish |
If you've ever wondered what goes behind closed doors in boardrooms and corner offices when CEOs want to build their companies into empires, The Last Tycoons is a good book to consult. Cohan puts readers inside the confidential meetings that helped re-shape corporate America and gave birth to the modern conglomerate. However, the books size and sheer amount of detail can seem a little overwhelming at times.
There are pages upon pages of testimony transcribed when it comes to the ITT-Hartford deal that plays a major part in the book and incredibly nuanced blow by blow, minute by minute descriptions of how Lazard's partners became partners, what they did, who they talked to, what they said and what letters they wrote to whom. While Cohan's research and knowledge of the subject is certainly highly impressive and obvious within the first 100 of the 668 pages of banking and M&A history, the minutia and seemingly endless reproduction of memos and letters written as far back as the 19th century, give the book a rather gossipy undertone. If you're a new employee of Lazard or thinking of joining the company, this is the kind of history you might find incredibly advantageous to come in and hit the ground running in your first few months on the job. For the rest of us, non-bankers, this is information we wouldn't be upset to find briefly summarized.
Ultimately, The Last Tycoons accomplishes what it sets out to do. It provides an excellent history of Lazard Freres from its founding as a store in New Orleans to its public listing and captures and describes the larger than life people at the top and how they changed the company over its long history. If Mr. Cohan were to briefly summarize the 200+ pages of ubiquitous reproductions of memos, letters, testimonies and highly detailed minutia, the book would be even more enjoyable. |
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