Merchants of Debt by George Anders
For more than a decade, Henry Kravis and George Roberts have been archetypes, first of Wall Street's boom years and then of its excesses. Their story and that of their firm - the biggest, most successful and most controversial participant in the age of leverage - illuminates an entire era of financial high jinks and speculative mania. Kravis and Roberts wrote their way into the history books by concocting one giant takeover after another. Their technique: the leveraged buyout, an audacious way to acquire a company with borrowed money, borrowed management - and a lot of nerve. Their firm, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co, dominated the Wall Street scene in the late 1980s, acquiring one Fortune 500 company after another, including Safeway, Duracell, Motel 6 and RJR Nabisco. This book draws on more than 250 interviews, including recurring access to the central figures and their KKR associates, as well as confidential documents and private correspondence to couch giant financial issues in human terms. It shows how pride, jealousy, fear, and ambition fuelled Wall Street's debt mania - with consequences that affected hundreds of thousands of people. The book addresses three questions - why did American business become so enchanted by debt in the 1980s? How exactly did Kravis and Roberts rise to the top of the heap? What have buyouts, especially KKR's deals, done to America's economic strength? In the tradition of "Barbarians at the Gate" and "The House of Morgan" this is a saga that takes readers behind closed boardroom doors to show how star-struck young bankers, ruthless deal-makers and nervous CEOs changed one another's lives - and the whole American economy - over a 15-year span.
George Anders is one of the founding writers at Bloomberg View, specializing in opinion pieces a b out the U.S. economy, financial markets, and innovation. He spent two decades as a top feature writer for The Wall Street Journal, where he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. He has also written for Fast Company, The New York Times, Parade, Smart Money, and Harvard Business Review. He is the author of three previous books, including the New York Times bestseller Perfect Enough, a biography of Carly Fiorina. He lives in northern California with his wife and two children.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780465045235 |
| ISBN 10 | 0465045235 |
| Title | Merchants of Debt |
| Author | George Anders |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Basic Books |
| Year published | 1993-05-18 |
| Number of pages | 368 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |