Dangerous Dreamers

The Financial Innovators from Charles Merrill to Michael Milken

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The go-go '80s are over. And along with them, says conventional wisdom, the aberrant financial behavior that ignited the late, great junk bond/leverage buyout era. The usual suspects - including Michael Milken and Co. - have been rounded up, prosecuted, and demonized. It's now back to business as usual ... Not likely, says Robert Sobel, the widely respected business historian who brings a deep knowledge of the workings, lore, and shifting mores of Wall Street to this insightful new book. In Dangerous Dreamers, the author investigates the real, continuing causes of the recent "Junk Decade" and places the period into compelling historical perspective. At the same time, he serves up life-sized portraits of some of Wall Street's most "dangerous dreamers," those sharp-eyed financial innovators whose machinations have instigated the Street's most dizzying periods of business creativity.^ Dangerous Dreamers is a true account of the brilliant outsiders who have disrupted the economic status quo for generations and left their indelible marks upon the way business is done in the United States and abroad. It's the story of such major figures as Louis Wolfson, Charles Merrill, James Ling, T. Boone Pickens, and, of course, Michael Milken - revealing what really makes these "disturbers of the peace" run, what they're after, and why men of their ilk are usually singled out for praise, then swiftly condemned by the financial community. At the same time, Dangerous Dreamers delivers a serious, in-depth analysis of the meaning of "Milkenism" in business and economic history. It traces the savvy bond salesman's meteoric rise to prominence in 1983 by assisting Pickens in his attempted takeover of Gulf Oil, probes his frenetic dealings at Drexel Burnham, and explains how he envisioned the junk bond as a vehicle for his ideas, not as an end in itself.^ Dangerous Dreamers also throws critical light on the major players of the junk bond era - the big banks, the pension and mutual funds, the insurance companies, and the S & Ls. It tells how Milken started out financing companies he considered the hopes of the future, and then provided the wherewithal for the restructuring - and the destabilizing - of some of America's largest corporations. It's brimming with tales of conglomerateurs, raiders, and government regulators, and the ways corporate America strikes back at those who threaten its power. Complete with a trenchant analysis of why Michael Milken was brought so low so quickly, and who had a stake in seeing him fall, Dangerous Dreamers is a fact-based, fast-paced book packed with object lessons for business professionals and serious business readers everywhere.