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The Last Tycoons The Secret History Of Lazard Freres & Co.
"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 Freres & 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.
"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 Freres & 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.
Audio CD
First published April 3, 2007
About the author
William D. Cohan
9 books168 followersWilliam David Cohan (born February 20, 1960) is an American business writer. He has written three books about business and economics and is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.
Prior to becoming a journalist, he worked on Wall Street for seventeen years. He spent six years at Lazard Frères in New York, then Merrill Lynch & Co., and later became a managing director at JP Morgan Chase. He also worked for two years at GE Capital. Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism, and Columbia University Graduate School of Business.
Cohan was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on February 20, 1960. His father was an accountant and his mother worked in administration.
In 1991 he married editor Deborah Gail Futter in a Jewish ceremony.
In 2007, he published The Last Tycoons The Secret History of Lazard Frères Co., about Lazard Frères. It won the 2007 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.
His book House of Cards A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, describing the last days of Bear Stearns & Co., was published in March 2009. The book has received excellent reviews and was described as a "masterfully reported account" by Tim Rutten in The Los Angeles Times. It remained on the New York Times Bestseller list for several months.
In an op-ed article in the New York Times, Cohan said in March 2009 that Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz and Lehman CEO Dick Fuld had engaged in a "tsunami of excuses" when they were responsible for their firms' collapse. In another op-ed written with Sandy B. Lewis in June 2009 he said that the current economic crisis is not over yet, and that "many of the fixes that the Obama administration has proposed will do little to address them and may make them worse."
His 2011 book, Money and Power How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World, examines the historical role and influence of Goldman Sachs.
His new book, The Price of Silence The Duke Lacrosse Scandal the Power of the Elite and the Corruption of Our Great Universities, about the story of the Duke lacrosse case, was published in 2014 by Scribner.
Prior to becoming a journalist, he worked on Wall Street for seventeen years. He spent six years at Lazard Frères in New York, then Merrill Lynch & Co., and later became a managing director at JP Morgan Chase. He also worked for two years at GE Capital. Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism, and Columbia University Graduate School of Business.
Cohan was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on February 20, 1960. His father was an accountant and his mother worked in administration.
In 1991 he married editor Deborah Gail Futter in a Jewish ceremony.
In 2007, he published The Last Tycoons The Secret History of Lazard Frères Co., about Lazard Frères. It won the 2007 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.
His book House of Cards A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, describing the last days of Bear Stearns & Co., was published in March 2009. The book has received excellent reviews and was described as a "masterfully reported account" by Tim Rutten in The Los Angeles Times. It remained on the New York Times Bestseller list for several months.
In an op-ed article in the New York Times, Cohan said in March 2009 that Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz and Lehman CEO Dick Fuld had engaged in a "tsunami of excuses" when they were responsible for their firms' collapse. In another op-ed written with Sandy B. Lewis in June 2009 he said that the current economic crisis is not over yet, and that "many of the fixes that the Obama administration has proposed will do little to address them and may make them worse."
His 2011 book, Money and Power How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World, examines the historical role and influence of Goldman Sachs.
His new book, The Price of Silence The Duke Lacrosse Scandal the Power of the Elite and the Corruption of Our Great Universities, about the story of the Duke lacrosse case, was published in 2014 by Scribner.
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April 6, 2019
The Last Tycoons, won the Business Book of the Year by Goldman Sachs in 2007. It tells a story of Lazard, a financial advisory and asset management firm. It is especially the history of the incredible people who worked there, at an obscure French investment bank, once so mysterious and so poorly understood until 1995 when the three Lazard Freres partnerships have banded together in order to form a new partnership, Lazard Capital Markets, to improve their financing and trading activities in Europe and in emerging markets.
It is really an incredible story of ego, of aggression and ambition as people in charge of the company who, frankly speaking, were unelected to anything, put themselves at the centre of three very interesting worlds - the world of finance, the world of government and the world of the media. To reach the success they, basically speaking, had to master each of these worlds.
Lazard is a hundred and seventy-year-old company based in Paris, London and in New York. It is known as an aristocratic and secretive business that serves financial advice to corporations, governments and the ultra-wealthy.
The book is written by William Cohan a former a mergers and acquisitions banker who worked at the company for several years. He is also a former journalist and has skill and qualifications... (if you like to read my full review please visit my blog https://leadersarereaders.blog/the-la...)
It is really an incredible story of ego, of aggression and ambition as people in charge of the company who, frankly speaking, were unelected to anything, put themselves at the centre of three very interesting worlds - the world of finance, the world of government and the world of the media. To reach the success they, basically speaking, had to master each of these worlds.
Lazard is a hundred and seventy-year-old company based in Paris, London and in New York. It is known as an aristocratic and secretive business that serves financial advice to corporations, governments and the ultra-wealthy.
The book is written by William Cohan a former a mergers and acquisitions banker who worked at the company for several years. He is also a former journalist and has skill and qualifications... (if you like to read my full review please visit my blog https://leadersarereaders.blog/the-la...)
September 3, 2016
Lazard Ltd is one of the most prestigious investment banks in the world, yet one of the least recognisable to the general public. Everybody has an opinion on the dubious nature of corporate- lending institutions that are supposed to oil the wheels of economic growth, yet Lazard Ltd has faced none of the opprobrium its rivals have lived with since September 2008. The chances are you might be learning of its existence for the first time by reading this review.
William D. Cohan’s history of Lazard Freres & Co (the predecessor to the Lazard Ltd now listed on the S&P 500 index) finishes at 2007 and received its first publication just one year before the near-destruction of the American banking system in September 2008. Nevertheless, Lazard must be the only investment bank that does not require an updated chapter on the last eight years to account for the existential threat faced by all other major houses during this time. Its share price trades above $31 as I write this ($10 above its IPO price in May 2005) and has been as high as $58 in the last twelve months. What makes it so special and so mythical in the world of High Finance?
Lazard has always prided itself on its image as the supreme Mergers & Acquisition (M&A) consultancy that offers nothing but the wisdom of its sagacious bankers. It takes no commercial deposits; has no use for transforming liabilities into assets; doesn’t engage in proprietary trading (e.g. using its own capital to bet on commodities and currencies); and has no role in the competitive world of financial derivatives. Besides Asset Management services ($186 billion under management in 2015), Lazard Ltd relies solely on revenue from M&A activity, the sector it has helped to pioneer over the last five decades.
The author, a former Lazard Managing Director, is keen to emphasise the innovative role of the bank over the years and his structure for this book is quite simple – a twentieth century history of High Finance as told through the achievements of its great men. A good number of names have passed through the global offices over the last one hundred years, yet two people stand out in its 150 year-old-heritage – Felix Rohatyn, said by his peers to be the greatest M&A banker of the last sixty years, and Bruce Wasserstein, the CEO that took the firm public in 2005 and made a fortune for himself in the process.
Rohatyn is presented as the resourceful Askenazi Jew who escaped Nazi persecution and found the American dream in the space of a decade. As Wall Street’s original media darling, Felix is all things to all people – cultured, charismatic, driven and socially liberal, yet a nightmare to work with. He also had a role in most US Corporate takeovers between 1965 and 1990, putting him in the same league as John Pierpoint Morgan and other titans of the last two centuries. But Cohan recognises his job is to look beyond the flattery: Rohatyn also comes across as disingenuous during ITT’s hostile bid for Hartford in 1969/70 and we later learn of his reluctance to take up an offer to run the World Bank in 1995 for fear it might be a career dead-end. The chance to become the US Ambassador in France during Clinton’s second administration is also treated with disappointment and scant consolation for not getting the Treasury Secretary position. (He takes it in the end.)
If Rohatyn is not content with being a Master of the Universe, Bruce ‘Bid Em Up’ Wasserstein makes him look modest in comparison. And Cohan is not a fan of the person most synonymous with Wall Street’s excesses of the 1980s, even if he is by far the most interesting of the dramatis personae in the book. No description of Bruce is complete without the word ‘genius’ and ‘shameless’ in the same sentence, whether it’s his New York Times Obituary in 2009, the many portraits of him in Fortune Magazine or in Cohan’s reluctant praise. It’s also in his micro-analysis of Wasserstein that we get to some of the fundamental questions about investment banking (not to be confused with trading).
Though, it takes over 500 pages to ask why M&A bankers get paid so much and with no consequences when their advice leads to bankruptcy, Wasserstein encapsulates the ‘take the fee and move on' mentality that underpins the industry. After all, this is the man who planned Texaco’s disruptive bid to stop Pennzoil from buying Getty Oil for $9 billion in 1984 with a counter offer of $10 billion. Part of the strategy was to extricate Getty from its initial agreement by convincing Texaco to indemnify Pennzoil for any legal fallout from breaking up the Pennzoil-Getty deal. Three years later Texaco received an $11.1 billion bill from the Supreme Court and filed for bankruptcy. Bruce pocketed his fee and moved on to the next deal as if nothing happened. Cohan insists that Wasserstein’s excuse that nobody forced the client to take his advice ‘is surely the last refuge of a scoundrel.’ That this man could take over Lazard with so many enemies on Wall Street is puzzling to the author. ‘Yet thanks to an unlikely confluence of events that could only have happened to Bruce Wasserstein, here he was, as of January 2002, in charge of Lazard and its second-largest individual shareholder.’
But Lazard is not just an American icon. For most of the late nineteenth century up to World War Two, New York played second fiddle to Paris and London. No bank other than JP Morgan had a more global reach in the inter-war years, and few were as revered. From the bank’s brilliant advice to fight the French currency crisis of 1924 with a classic ���short squeeze’ to London’s secret bail-out by the Bank of England in 1931 following the actions of a rogue trader, the two European houses have a fascinating history of their own. Yet Cohan abandons his interest in the European operations once the great Andre Meyer escapes the Nazis and arrives in the US to take over New York from Frank Altschule. For the rest of the book they are but an occasional footnote in the story of Felix Rohatyn and Steve Rattner and the evolution of M&A banking on Wall Street in the post-war years.
Fortunately, no story of tremendous wealth, opulent tastes, high society and ground-breaking advances in corporate baking is complete without a pompous autocrat who can say with a straight-face, “Beware of self-made men.” Here is the cue for Michel David-Weill, the billionaire despot, to take centre-stage for one-third of the book. As a blood relative of the founding Lazard brothers, Michel is everything you’d expect from a French Jew – desperate to cling to an ideal of aristocracy that ended in the eighteenth-century when his ancestors were still confined to ghettoes. He wiles away his time from the 1970s to the early 2000s amassing one of the world’s most impressive art collections, pursuing mistresses, cultivating the press and pretending to be philosophical. Though an unwitting consequence of Cohan’s portrayal, you cannot help but despise a man who never closes any M&A deals, but holds the purse strings for the year-end bonuses like a slave-master seeking recognition from his chattel. Only a man as pampered and rich as Michel could look back on his escape from Nazi-Europe and say, “Frankly, I had no idea I was Jewish… I learned I was Jewish because of the war.” Somehow, I can’t imagine the more modest (and famous) Rothschild family being so trivial or iconoclastic about their racial heritage. A more capricious or whimsical dynast is unimaginable, but caricaturists will enjoy reading about him.
With other works behind him since writing The Last Tycoons, Cohan is now a master in his field and on par with Michael Lewis as one of the best historians of modern finance. But, unlike Lewis, he prefers the epic survey texts that explore the evolution of today’s Wall Street through the prism of the last 150 years. This is a notable exception to the tendency to focus everything in the post-Bretton Woods era and provides welcome relief to the short-sighted narratives dominating the current bookshelves.
Yes, the Last Tycoons is a big undertaking, not least because it comes in at over 650 pages. But don’t let that put you off. This is better than Cohan’s 2009 history of Goldman Sachs and is not bogged down with complicated interpretations of how Wall Street’s near-collapse symbolises our present age.
One hopes the onward march of Finance & Banking History will take another step in its quest to achieve a foothold in mainstream academia with this book. And why can’t Cohan make it the next big thing in university departments preoccupied with Gender History and Post-Modernism?
A genealogy of Citigroup’s origins in banking and insurance would make a good project for his next work.
William D. Cohan’s history of Lazard Freres & Co (the predecessor to the Lazard Ltd now listed on the S&P 500 index) finishes at 2007 and received its first publication just one year before the near-destruction of the American banking system in September 2008. Nevertheless, Lazard must be the only investment bank that does not require an updated chapter on the last eight years to account for the existential threat faced by all other major houses during this time. Its share price trades above $31 as I write this ($10 above its IPO price in May 2005) and has been as high as $58 in the last twelve months. What makes it so special and so mythical in the world of High Finance?
Lazard has always prided itself on its image as the supreme Mergers & Acquisition (M&A) consultancy that offers nothing but the wisdom of its sagacious bankers. It takes no commercial deposits; has no use for transforming liabilities into assets; doesn’t engage in proprietary trading (e.g. using its own capital to bet on commodities and currencies); and has no role in the competitive world of financial derivatives. Besides Asset Management services ($186 billion under management in 2015), Lazard Ltd relies solely on revenue from M&A activity, the sector it has helped to pioneer over the last five decades.
The author, a former Lazard Managing Director, is keen to emphasise the innovative role of the bank over the years and his structure for this book is quite simple – a twentieth century history of High Finance as told through the achievements of its great men. A good number of names have passed through the global offices over the last one hundred years, yet two people stand out in its 150 year-old-heritage – Felix Rohatyn, said by his peers to be the greatest M&A banker of the last sixty years, and Bruce Wasserstein, the CEO that took the firm public in 2005 and made a fortune for himself in the process.
Rohatyn is presented as the resourceful Askenazi Jew who escaped Nazi persecution and found the American dream in the space of a decade. As Wall Street’s original media darling, Felix is all things to all people – cultured, charismatic, driven and socially liberal, yet a nightmare to work with. He also had a role in most US Corporate takeovers between 1965 and 1990, putting him in the same league as John Pierpoint Morgan and other titans of the last two centuries. But Cohan recognises his job is to look beyond the flattery: Rohatyn also comes across as disingenuous during ITT’s hostile bid for Hartford in 1969/70 and we later learn of his reluctance to take up an offer to run the World Bank in 1995 for fear it might be a career dead-end. The chance to become the US Ambassador in France during Clinton’s second administration is also treated with disappointment and scant consolation for not getting the Treasury Secretary position. (He takes it in the end.)
If Rohatyn is not content with being a Master of the Universe, Bruce ‘Bid Em Up’ Wasserstein makes him look modest in comparison. And Cohan is not a fan of the person most synonymous with Wall Street’s excesses of the 1980s, even if he is by far the most interesting of the dramatis personae in the book. No description of Bruce is complete without the word ‘genius’ and ‘shameless’ in the same sentence, whether it’s his New York Times Obituary in 2009, the many portraits of him in Fortune Magazine or in Cohan’s reluctant praise. It’s also in his micro-analysis of Wasserstein that we get to some of the fundamental questions about investment banking (not to be confused with trading).
Though, it takes over 500 pages to ask why M&A bankers get paid so much and with no consequences when their advice leads to bankruptcy, Wasserstein encapsulates the ‘take the fee and move on' mentality that underpins the industry. After all, this is the man who planned Texaco’s disruptive bid to stop Pennzoil from buying Getty Oil for $9 billion in 1984 with a counter offer of $10 billion. Part of the strategy was to extricate Getty from its initial agreement by convincing Texaco to indemnify Pennzoil for any legal fallout from breaking up the Pennzoil-Getty deal. Three years later Texaco received an $11.1 billion bill from the Supreme Court and filed for bankruptcy. Bruce pocketed his fee and moved on to the next deal as if nothing happened. Cohan insists that Wasserstein’s excuse that nobody forced the client to take his advice ‘is surely the last refuge of a scoundrel.’ That this man could take over Lazard with so many enemies on Wall Street is puzzling to the author. ‘Yet thanks to an unlikely confluence of events that could only have happened to Bruce Wasserstein, here he was, as of January 2002, in charge of Lazard and its second-largest individual shareholder.’
But Lazard is not just an American icon. For most of the late nineteenth century up to World War Two, New York played second fiddle to Paris and London. No bank other than JP Morgan had a more global reach in the inter-war years, and few were as revered. From the bank’s brilliant advice to fight the French currency crisis of 1924 with a classic ���short squeeze’ to London’s secret bail-out by the Bank of England in 1931 following the actions of a rogue trader, the two European houses have a fascinating history of their own. Yet Cohan abandons his interest in the European operations once the great Andre Meyer escapes the Nazis and arrives in the US to take over New York from Frank Altschule. For the rest of the book they are but an occasional footnote in the story of Felix Rohatyn and Steve Rattner and the evolution of M&A banking on Wall Street in the post-war years.
Fortunately, no story of tremendous wealth, opulent tastes, high society and ground-breaking advances in corporate baking is complete without a pompous autocrat who can say with a straight-face, “Beware of self-made men.” Here is the cue for Michel David-Weill, the billionaire despot, to take centre-stage for one-third of the book. As a blood relative of the founding Lazard brothers, Michel is everything you’d expect from a French Jew – desperate to cling to an ideal of aristocracy that ended in the eighteenth-century when his ancestors were still confined to ghettoes. He wiles away his time from the 1970s to the early 2000s amassing one of the world’s most impressive art collections, pursuing mistresses, cultivating the press and pretending to be philosophical. Though an unwitting consequence of Cohan’s portrayal, you cannot help but despise a man who never closes any M&A deals, but holds the purse strings for the year-end bonuses like a slave-master seeking recognition from his chattel. Only a man as pampered and rich as Michel could look back on his escape from Nazi-Europe and say, “Frankly, I had no idea I was Jewish… I learned I was Jewish because of the war.” Somehow, I can’t imagine the more modest (and famous) Rothschild family being so trivial or iconoclastic about their racial heritage. A more capricious or whimsical dynast is unimaginable, but caricaturists will enjoy reading about him.
With other works behind him since writing The Last Tycoons, Cohan is now a master in his field and on par with Michael Lewis as one of the best historians of modern finance. But, unlike Lewis, he prefers the epic survey texts that explore the evolution of today’s Wall Street through the prism of the last 150 years. This is a notable exception to the tendency to focus everything in the post-Bretton Woods era and provides welcome relief to the short-sighted narratives dominating the current bookshelves.
Yes, the Last Tycoons is a big undertaking, not least because it comes in at over 650 pages. But don’t let that put you off. This is better than Cohan’s 2009 history of Goldman Sachs and is not bogged down with complicated interpretations of how Wall Street’s near-collapse symbolises our present age.
One hopes the onward march of Finance & Banking History will take another step in its quest to achieve a foothold in mainstream academia with this book. And why can’t Cohan make it the next big thing in university departments preoccupied with Gender History and Post-Modernism?
A genealogy of Citigroup’s origins in banking and insurance would make a good project for his next work.
October 23, 2007
The author is a former banker and journalist, and he writes like the former. His stylistic quirks - he tends to complete rather nondescript thoughts with menaningless quotations from the players which add nothing - are annoying and amateurish. And while it is well researched and footnoted, the history of the once secretive Lazard Freres is not all that exciting. However, there is some juicy gossip, and the best portions center on the massive egos of the various stars in the firm. Those chapters read like an extended Vanity Fair article, catty and snooty, and make for some real fun.
March 6, 2024
One of the best books ever on M&A and investment banking!
July 9, 2019
Subtitled “The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. ”, this is the story of simultaneous birth of globe-spanning financial empires and financial mismanagement that could harm millions.
July 29, 2009
Compelling history of Lazard Frères & Co.
If investment banking and the history of big deals fascinate you, getAbstract invites you to sit down with this compelling history of Lazard Frères & Co., from its humble beginnings through its astounding success. The stories of the dominant personalities who used the Lazard mystique to garner unbelievable fees are legendary. As a former journalist and Lazard banker, William D. Cohan has the skill and qualifications to tell this story. While he covers many of Lazard’s biggest men and biggest deals, he never bogs down in technical details. The author focuses on the firm’s leaders, and shows their personalities, strengths and foibles. These stories cover shocking self-interest and staggering amounts of money. This large book has a cast of hundreds; it is attributed carefully and well-indexed, though it could use a personnel timeline. Cohan keeps you on track by focusing on the men who led Lazard over the 157 years that it was a family firm. Many of the personal revelations are quite sensational and the book is almost always entertaining.
If investment banking and the history of big deals fascinate you, getAbstract invites you to sit down with this compelling history of Lazard Frères & Co., from its humble beginnings through its astounding success. The stories of the dominant personalities who used the Lazard mystique to garner unbelievable fees are legendary. As a former journalist and Lazard banker, William D. Cohan has the skill and qualifications to tell this story. While he covers many of Lazard’s biggest men and biggest deals, he never bogs down in technical details. The author focuses on the firm’s leaders, and shows their personalities, strengths and foibles. These stories cover shocking self-interest and staggering amounts of money. This large book has a cast of hundreds; it is attributed carefully and well-indexed, though it could use a personnel timeline. Cohan keeps you on track by focusing on the men who led Lazard over the 157 years that it was a family firm. Many of the personal revelations are quite sensational and the book is almost always entertaining.
May 10, 2008
Will written, but LONG and really only for the die hard lover of the history of wall street. On a positive note I thought it was fair and well researched and did not have an agenda, a big bonus considering it was written by a former Lazard partner.
July 31, 2008
This is a gossipy history of an investment bank, most of it dedicated to the last 20 years where the most gossip is available. It contains all of the joys and limitations of good gossip, although non-bankers may find the descriptions of the various compensation packages a little arcane.
March 14, 2021
This is one of those books that opened up to me a whole world of Mergers and Acquisitions and how the Corporate world is shark infested.
The intrigues in this book about running a company and the Corporate Law that goes with it...jump out of the book like a movie. Investment bankers are shrewd Lawyers who play the numbers game.
I am still unable to explain the link between rich men and their love for collecting art.
I also found out that rich men have specific places where they hang out.
Michael to me seemed to be the Din, but his style of being a near dictator informed all the choices for all the incoming heads of the Lazard organisation. It is no secret that no one would work with Michael but finally I think he met his match when Bruce came in..
Running an organisation in Europe is different from how you can do it in America and way different from London. The French roots in this organisation go to show the appreciation for culture and art including lifestyle of the rich and famous.
I have always known something about Bankers, that they know the law too well. After this read I cannot trust a banker...let alone an investment banker....the type that makes money by giving you advice. Bankers are so unloyal and will go to bed with whoever gives a better bid...it is just business. One thing is apparent....for you to have clout in this game you must have the network to feed from...
Best chapter for me was "Civil War"...followed by that chapter about a cigarette that was lit and blown...
High pressure environments also do have people just die of heart attacks at a very young age....not fair!
The secrecy as to the affairs of the investment banks and the funds they operate tells a lot. The fees and commissions are big money! No wonder they are secretive about it..they do not blow the trumpet.
I believe every Corporate lawyer out there or anyone that talks the language of IPO of M&E needs to read this book
The intrigues in this book about running a company and the Corporate Law that goes with it...jump out of the book like a movie. Investment bankers are shrewd Lawyers who play the numbers game.
I am still unable to explain the link between rich men and their love for collecting art.
I also found out that rich men have specific places where they hang out.
Michael to me seemed to be the Din, but his style of being a near dictator informed all the choices for all the incoming heads of the Lazard organisation. It is no secret that no one would work with Michael but finally I think he met his match when Bruce came in..
Running an organisation in Europe is different from how you can do it in America and way different from London. The French roots in this organisation go to show the appreciation for culture and art including lifestyle of the rich and famous.
I have always known something about Bankers, that they know the law too well. After this read I cannot trust a banker...let alone an investment banker....the type that makes money by giving you advice. Bankers are so unloyal and will go to bed with whoever gives a better bid...it is just business. One thing is apparent....for you to have clout in this game you must have the network to feed from...
Best chapter for me was "Civil War"...followed by that chapter about a cigarette that was lit and blown...
High pressure environments also do have people just die of heart attacks at a very young age....not fair!
The secrecy as to the affairs of the investment banks and the funds they operate tells a lot. The fees and commissions are big money! No wonder they are secretive about it..they do not blow the trumpet.
I believe every Corporate lawyer out there or anyone that talks the language of IPO of M&E needs to read this book
November 19, 2023
This was a very well researched, well written history of one of the legendary global investment banks. I give it four stars because it is awfully long, perhaps too detailed -- almost to the point of occasionally being academic. I think the TAM for this book is small -- basically wharton undergraduates from the 1980s and 1990s who were dying to get a job at the legendary Lazard Freres.
The story has a few really good arcs. One of them is that Lazard was focused on great men -- on the stars who could bring in enormous business and feed the entire firm. The firm was considered the quintessential investment bank, with high end, secretive European bankers advising the biggest, most sophisticated corporate mergers. Its famous bankers included refugees Andrew Meyer, then Felix Rohatyn, Steve Rattner and Bruce Wasserstein, but also other famous bankers like Ira Harris (Chicago), Eduardo Stern (Paris), and others. So while Goldman Sachs has always tried to focus on the firm or the franchise, Lazard felt very comfortable focusing on its stars.
The other interesting arc was how do you scale a high-ego financial services firm that depends on people. At Lazard, the owner was Michel David-Weill and he clung to all of the power (ie, compensation). Although there were many attempts to institutionalize the business, he always resisted and as a result the firm was never able to scale to the heights achieved by competitors like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
Worth a read, but only for people who have certain interests...
The story has a few really good arcs. One of them is that Lazard was focused on great men -- on the stars who could bring in enormous business and feed the entire firm. The firm was considered the quintessential investment bank, with high end, secretive European bankers advising the biggest, most sophisticated corporate mergers. Its famous bankers included refugees Andrew Meyer, then Felix Rohatyn, Steve Rattner and Bruce Wasserstein, but also other famous bankers like Ira Harris (Chicago), Eduardo Stern (Paris), and others. So while Goldman Sachs has always tried to focus on the firm or the franchise, Lazard felt very comfortable focusing on its stars.
The other interesting arc was how do you scale a high-ego financial services firm that depends on people. At Lazard, the owner was Michel David-Weill and he clung to all of the power (ie, compensation). Although there were many attempts to institutionalize the business, he always resisted and as a result the firm was never able to scale to the heights achieved by competitors like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
Worth a read, but only for people who have certain interests...
October 18, 2023
This book provided an in-depth look and analysis of a company that is fascinating and that I knew very little about. The author was very diligent and deliberate in laying out different phases in the company and the key individuals involved at the different stages as well as fitting these stages within a more comprehensive narrative arc. This book was a blend of a number of topics that I find very interesting and am keen to learn more about including corporate finance, financial regulation, financial history and corporate management among others. The book was also very well researched with the author providing expansive coverage of different aspects of the story, from corporate controversies to personnel payments to adventurous affairs. The main drawback to this book was that it was very dense, definitely not an easy read, with 10 pages occasionally taking upwards of 30 minutes to read, understand and digest. The level of detail included about specific deal terms or individuals involved did not always seem to be necessary. This easily could have been split into multiple books or at the very least chapters could have been cut down to make each shorter or more focused on a single topic. Nonetheless, I feel the time spent reading this book was time very well spent, piquing my interest in Lazard and providing an interesting perspective on the corporate environment over this period, the investment banking industry, the firm and the characters involved.
August 7, 2019
I wonder if it is serendipity or pure coincidence that on the second day listening to this rather long book I was playing the game of "Acquire" (a '60s board game) with family and realized that my daughter-in-law is skilled (but nice) financial cutthroat. The book, as I say, is rather long and has its interesting bits. But, by and large, I would recommend (if you can find one) learning to play the board game and leave the real-life game of mergers and acquisitions to the investment bankers who lurk in the financial districts of the major cities of the world - it will be time well spent.
The book's author has experience in the M&A game, but I think he would likely admit, if cornered, that he wrote the book to make a buck; knowing that avid readers such as myself will read just about anything if it claims to give us "inside information." Of course, insider information is exactly the sort of stuff for which investment bankers can go to jail if they are caught. What a world. And actually, I'm not sure you will learn very much about the mechanics of investment banking from this book, only a good deal about some of the (greedy?) practicioners of this modern form of trade.
The book's author has experience in the M&A game, but I think he would likely admit, if cornered, that he wrote the book to make a buck; knowing that avid readers such as myself will read just about anything if it claims to give us "inside information." Of course, insider information is exactly the sort of stuff for which investment bankers can go to jail if they are caught. What a world. And actually, I'm not sure you will learn very much about the mechanics of investment banking from this book, only a good deal about some of the (greedy?) practicioners of this modern form of trade.
March 14, 2020
This book was definetly one of the best business books I’ve read. It gives great insight into the lives and mindsets of the financial elite. The book is surprisingly interesting, as its fiction-like narrative transforms the boring topic of finance (at least for most people) into a page-turner. The book allows the readers to get a hint of the lives of finance tycoons, not only through their business successes, but by going deeper into their personal lives. For example, the book goes into much detail of the life of Felix Rohatyn, who comes to New York after fleeing Nazi occupied Germany, to become a financial wizard who saves the city from going bankrupt and contains much detail about the lives of many similar characters. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in lives driven by power and ambition. To summarize, this books tells the stories of men “who had iron fists in velvet gloves”.
March 29, 2019
I listened to this during my obsession with white collar crime books. While there is no obvious criminal activity taking place in this story, there is certainly borderline behavior that took place. This was a very interesting history of a company that I knew next to nothing about. I learned more than I ever thought I would want to know about M&A firms and banking, and also realized that it appears to be just as confusing and non-explainable to those making the money as to the rest of the world. They just know the right buttons to push to fill their bank accounts. It was a little dry in parts, but overall not a bad listen for a book on a financial institution.
July 24, 2020
It's a revealing and some what cautionary tale (at times) of one of the most enigmatic Wall Street firms. Though the book is unnecessarily long, the points and anecdotes it contains are often worth one's patience.
September 17, 2022
Fascinating history of the bank that parallels the changes in modern finance. Clear eyed about banking without being fawning and a lot of great insight into how banks like lazard are structure and how they are profitable.
May 1, 2024
cannot survive this book anymore.
giving up on chapter 5 (of 20 chapters). I've spent probably 6+ hours reading this book and it is too tiring for me, albeit interesting. It covers the minutiae of what any man would be hard-pressed to appreciate past its time.
giving up on chapter 5 (of 20 chapters). I've spent probably 6+ hours reading this book and it is too tiring for me, albeit interesting. It covers the minutiae of what any man would be hard-pressed to appreciate past its time.
August 19, 2019
Pretty good biopic of the history of one of the last private investment banking firms. Was an enjoyable read.
February 14, 2021
Read it 10 years ago and remember it dragging at the end but I love financial non-fiction with a strong narrative style like Michael Lewis
July 24, 2022
Very familiar to anyone who worked in investment banking before it was taken over by the big banks. A vanishing breed.
Read
May 25, 2017Well, look, I don’t swear very often, but p36 is profoundly unreasonable to former colleagues [DBW, RC, and TL] and on p358 [much better stewardship is expected]; and similarly on p370. p37 at least has the merits of being written in the kind of language that can be presented to the court of the Comte de Bouffant-délicat-avec-les traits d’unions-ces-jours-cì-sniff. (less cheekily, a setting of the hyphens appears to be offered on pp883 and 896 of JM Roberts' New Penguin History of the World 5th ed'n and appears to be a nod to Israel in Egypt. See also pp400-1 Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club.)
p409 (I haven’t got there yet, but did a quick look for Pearson in the index) is obviously a hotbed of mischief; and p89 in inverted commas and inset. I have got to p404 at the time of typing; the content obviously tells of at least one person's mischief. And Mr Rohatyn's departure from Lazard is introduced at the beginning of p405; a subsequent re-reading of p409 has not modified the earlier assessment. A variation on the theme is presented on p568.
#thethingoverthere - p90, 173, 188, 197, 238, 248, 274, 278, 385, 388, 391, 392, 438, 500, 523, 527, 542, 547, 551 (i.e. temptress, temptor and prey - similarly on p652), 561, 562, 569, 570, 571, 577, 606, 613, 618, 629, 661, 663
#peopletrafficking-p95, 145, 153, 188, 191, 196, 219, 233, 240, 246, 278, 362, 377, 385, 388, 389, 390, 393, 528, 529, 538, 553, 566, 574, 578, 580, 581, 583, 584, 599, 612, 630, 631, 645, 646, 659
#moneylaundering-p95, 145, 153, 191, 196, 219, 233, 240, 246, 278, 362, 385, 388, 393, 417, 487, 494, 528, 529, 538, 554, 566, 574, 578, 580, 581, 583, 584, 599, 612, 630, 631, 643, 645, 646, 659
#insiderdealing -p169, 242, 253, 582
#faoregulators -on p97, what sort of arrangements would be necessary to set up and protect conversations that need to be protected properly? e.g. p329, 330. p345; pp360-366, 397, 466, 592, 595, 601, 611, 619, 620, 667
#torture - p502, 525, 603
#fraud -p565, 566
So, everyone, take a deep breath, pause a moment and have a think about what needs to be brought to the table in context-specific instances. Ty.
p156, p175-177, 190, 322, 325, 327, 390, 395, 417, 427, 439, 441, 467, 470, 502, 530, 536, 545, 556, pp558-9 565, 576, 579, 589, 591, 604, 605, 617, 623, 631, 644, 648, 651, 655, 661, 666 and 667 appear to include a conversation about God's Bankers talking amongst themselves about each other about what God's Bankers do in the way in which God's Bankers do those things that God's Bankers do. What are the house arrangements for nominating the adult in the room for such circumstances? The first go at a good set of answers may not include the word accordingly; on subsequent occasions, the justification for its use should be available for immediate scrutiny.
On p652, from where does the expectation that Goldman acts as market maker originate, and which parts of Goldmanian grammar need to be modified?
p157 appears to be a bit ham-fisted; p468 slightly less-so. What might a more formal reference to the original position include in each?
p334 - what else would be significant?- the period reported here covers the UK departure from the European Exchange Rate mechanism.
pp335-6 need to be de-convoluted; and p337 separately. And p338 on obviously different grounds. And p339 separately. And p450 separately.
On p354, we have the imprimatur, which is latin for let it be printed. The other it, the other thing; the other thing, over there need(s) to be addressed appropriately: don't be rude.
p391 needs to be de-convoluted: don't be rude.
p409 (I haven’t got there yet, but did a quick look for Pearson in the index) is obviously a hotbed of mischief; and p89 in inverted commas and inset. I have got to p404 at the time of typing; the content obviously tells of at least one person's mischief. And Mr Rohatyn's departure from Lazard is introduced at the beginning of p405; a subsequent re-reading of p409 has not modified the earlier assessment. A variation on the theme is presented on p568.
#thethingoverthere - p90, 173, 188, 197, 238, 248, 274, 278, 385, 388, 391, 392, 438, 500, 523, 527, 542, 547, 551 (i.e. temptress, temptor and prey - similarly on p652), 561, 562, 569, 570, 571, 577, 606, 613, 618, 629, 661, 663
#peopletrafficking-p95, 145, 153, 188, 191, 196, 219, 233, 240, 246, 278, 362, 377, 385, 388, 389, 390, 393, 528, 529, 538, 553, 566, 574, 578, 580, 581, 583, 584, 599, 612, 630, 631, 645, 646, 659
#moneylaundering-p95, 145, 153, 191, 196, 219, 233, 240, 246, 278, 362, 385, 388, 393, 417, 487, 494, 528, 529, 538, 554, 566, 574, 578, 580, 581, 583, 584, 599, 612, 630, 631, 643, 645, 646, 659
#insiderdealing -p169, 242, 253, 582
#faoregulators -on p97, what sort of arrangements would be necessary to set up and protect conversations that need to be protected properly? e.g. p329, 330. p345; pp360-366, 397, 466, 592, 595, 601, 611, 619, 620, 667
#torture - p502, 525, 603
#fraud -p565, 566
So, everyone, take a deep breath, pause a moment and have a think about what needs to be brought to the table in context-specific instances. Ty.
p156, p175-177, 190, 322, 325, 327, 390, 395, 417, 427, 439, 441, 467, 470, 502, 530, 536, 545, 556, pp558-9 565, 576, 579, 589, 591, 604, 605, 617, 623, 631, 644, 648, 651, 655, 661, 666 and 667 appear to include a conversation about God's Bankers talking amongst themselves about each other about what God's Bankers do in the way in which God's Bankers do those things that God's Bankers do. What are the house arrangements for nominating the adult in the room for such circumstances? The first go at a good set of answers may not include the word accordingly; on subsequent occasions, the justification for its use should be available for immediate scrutiny.
On p652, from where does the expectation that Goldman acts as market maker originate, and which parts of Goldmanian grammar need to be modified?
p157 appears to be a bit ham-fisted; p468 slightly less-so. What might a more formal reference to the original position include in each?
p334 - what else would be significant?- the period reported here covers the UK departure from the European Exchange Rate mechanism.
pp335-6 need to be de-convoluted; and p337 separately. And p338 on obviously different grounds. And p339 separately. And p450 separately.
On p354, we have the imprimatur, which is latin for let it be printed. The other it, the other thing; the other thing, over there need(s) to be addressed appropriately: don't be rude.
p391 needs to be de-convoluted: don't be rude.
March 2, 2017
Growing up in the 1980s, you became aware of the changes in the US, and UK's economy in the face of vicious deregulation.and other economic changes. If you asked people to name the bankers involved in those changes, Lazard's would be one of the banks that people mentioned.
This book traces the history of Lazard's from its' humble beginnings (as a merchant) to the sort of bank that the 99%ers have come to love to hate. It's an interesting book. Breezy to read at first but kind of depressingly gossipy towards the end, when we learn how the once great bank became almost unmanageable in the 1970s through to the 1980s when internal management controls were barely heeded at all.
You'll enjoy the book, but you'll get depress by then end, when you realise that behinf the facade, there were times that a venerable old bank would buckle under their weight of their poor management practices.
This book traces the history of Lazard's from its' humble beginnings (as a merchant) to the sort of bank that the 99%ers have come to love to hate. It's an interesting book. Breezy to read at first but kind of depressingly gossipy towards the end, when we learn how the once great bank became almost unmanageable in the 1970s through to the 1980s when internal management controls were barely heeded at all.
You'll enjoy the book, but you'll get depress by then end, when you realise that behinf the facade, there were times that a venerable old bank would buckle under their weight of their poor management practices.
February 18, 2017
Never before have I given a five star rating to a book of which I had only read 9%. However, this book is special in many ways, and if the beginning is any indication of the author's thoughts and reflections, it merits this rating. I eagerly await my future readings of this splendid work.
April 5, 2016
REVIEW OF AUDIOBOOK; APRIL 6, 2016
Narrator: Robertson Dean
This was great fun. I enjoyed every few hours I gave to it every day, in-between my fiction listening. Having had some experience in the financial industry, I could easily relate to the issues and the personalities. It's not technically heavy as far as financial jargon is concerned, nor does Cohan go into the intricacies of a merger and acquisition. The book stays squarely on the personalities - the people involved in the history of Lazard Frères, especially Michel David-Weill, Felix Rohatyn, and Bruce Wasserstein who eventually took Lazard public, a move Michel had been very much against.
Robertson Dean narrated this book very well. His voice was easy to listen to and did not distract me (as Dick Hill has a tendency to do with his cadence) so I looked forward to the few hours each day spent at his proverbial feet as he regaled me with stories about the rich and famous in the financial industry.
Narrator: Robertson Dean
This was great fun. I enjoyed every few hours I gave to it every day, in-between my fiction listening. Having had some experience in the financial industry, I could easily relate to the issues and the personalities. It's not technically heavy as far as financial jargon is concerned, nor does Cohan go into the intricacies of a merger and acquisition. The book stays squarely on the personalities - the people involved in the history of Lazard Frères, especially Michel David-Weill, Felix Rohatyn, and Bruce Wasserstein who eventually took Lazard public, a move Michel had been very much against.
Robertson Dean narrated this book very well. His voice was easy to listen to and did not distract me (as Dick Hill has a tendency to do with his cadence) so I looked forward to the few hours each day spent at his proverbial feet as he regaled me with stories about the rich and famous in the financial industry.
Read
February 12, 2016u have credit to the author for the detailed research he has done both on the firm as well as the individual lives of the people related to lazard...definitely in the same league as some of the other prominent Investment Banking books,,,,
among the -ves...quite verbose at times..u feel bored at times as book discuss many issues not exactly linked to the firm working..like art collections of their owners etc..
i have read barbaraians at the gate before this and its a problem with most of these books that even in their new editions they dont update the book...so in this book u dont get to know what happened to lazard after ipo in last 3 years and u have to check on google for the same
among the -ves...quite verbose at times..u feel bored at times as book discuss many issues not exactly linked to the firm working..like art collections of their owners etc..
i have read barbaraians at the gate before this and its a problem with most of these books that even in their new editions they dont update the book...so in this book u dont get to know what happened to lazard after ipo in last 3 years and u have to check on google for the same
May 3, 2018
Very strong start, with a compelling story of Lazard. For anyone working o the industry, this is an amazing book. Profiles of very interesting people such as André Meyer and Felix Rohatyn.
The last 20% of the book is a little bit shallow and seems to be written in a hurry, in order to publish the book, soon after the IPO of Lazard. And clearly the author is not a fan of Mr. Wasserstein, something that is pretty clear through the reading.
But the reading is very enjoyable, easy reading considering it’s a 600+ pages books.
The last 20% of the book is a little bit shallow and seems to be written in a hurry, in order to publish the book, soon after the IPO of Lazard. And clearly the author is not a fan of Mr. Wasserstein, something that is pretty clear through the reading.
But the reading is very enjoyable, easy reading considering it’s a 600+ pages books.
September 30, 2008
I can understand entirely why the average reader would not be very interested in this book but it is an incredibly well research and entertaining look at one of Wall Street's most impressive firms. While I found the end of the book that deals with the most recent developments within the firm to be a bit rambling I found the balance of the firm's history (and especially the historical perspective given to it) rather fascinating.
April 29, 2015
Cohan is a thorough researcher and has made a candid picture of the people and motives behind Lazard. I admire his thoroughness and patience. On the other hand, I am so used to reading about a company through their characters, that I miss the story and find the narration of people and facts sometimes lengthy. So for the sake of preciseness and completeness, Cohan has sacrificed literature and storytelling. A great book but not necessarily a vivid colourful painting.
Currently reading
July 12, 2008As expected, This book is really good. It tells us about Lazard Freres & co, it's intrigue, etc...... It is about history about the success and the end of the last private company, after surviving more than a hundred years.
I won't make a lot of comment because i haven't finished it. Hopefully, i have a lot of time to read it........
I won't make a lot of comment because i haven't finished it. Hopefully, i have a lot of time to read it........
February 28, 2011
This was a tough one - there were parts of it that I really liked (the more recent history, their conversations about going public, etc.) particularly around their ridiculously insular culture, but there were also whole sections that dragged terribly. So I would say interesting to those who have seen a bank from the inside, could have gotten a bit tougher with the editing pen.
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