Customer Reviews

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co.

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

This book is a classic "insiders" look at the world of Wall Street and one of its most fabled and tortured partnerships (using the term very loosely given the way they treated each other). If you found the classic late 80s/early 90s books like Barbarians, Liars Poker and others riveting you will be right there again with this extremely well written book.

The level of cooperation the author received is amazing - the partners must all have been quite fearful of their potential portrayal and many of them have eagerly shared their recollections. Woven together these conversations create an incredibly detailed account of what happened and what the various parties were thinking (or scheming) about at various stages. Contrary to some of the other reviews here - I found the book not loaded with rumor but in fact studded with primary accounts.

With the exception of a very detailed review of Lazard's involvment with ITT the book moves at a brisk pace and I "inhaled" it over a couple of days. The ITT section is deeply researched and shows how close Rohaytan came to stepping on the third rail - but it is not the easiest section of the book to read. The final third of the book is absolutely fascinating as Cohan details the imperious Michel being trampled by the despicable Bruce Wasserstein. What goes around comes around.

To fully enjoy this book it helps to have some general awareness of Wall Street - but it is not essential. So much of what transpires is pure human theatre - greed, power,lust - that the setting is less relevant. These characters and their actions could just as easily been depicted by the Bard as by Cohan.

I'm not sure why some of the other reviews so far have been so pointed and critical (not to mention poorly written) - but from this reader with no axe to grind I can highly recommend this book.

Cohan has done an extraodinary amount of research, and this enables him to paint a vivid picture of the leading personalities at Lazard as well as to capture the firm's quirky culture. But, with the exception of its blistering account of the current Lazard leader, Wasserstein, the reader doesn't get a good sense of exactly what these investment bankers do during their day jobs. What is the nature of their advice, do they earn their keep, and with the benefit of history do they give the right advice? Other than Wasserstein, whom Cohan criticizes as dead wrong and completely mercenary throughout his career, we don't get a good sense of how these bankers do their work.

Absent that insight, and this may be difficult insight to deliver given the nature of the advice and surrounding circumstances, the book tends to degenerate into gossip. Anyone who has worked in a professional firm can, of course, relate to Lazard's dysfunctional culture and can appreciate the value of rainmaking over hard work. So this is quite interesting and perhaps useful gossip. But the real question presented by Lazard is just what do these bankers do and are they errant fiduciaries who take advantage of their influence over a deal to drive it at all costs so as to ensure ridiculously high fees?

With respect to Wasserstein, Cohan's contempt shines through. He does seem to represent everything that is wrong with Wall Street, though in fairness to him, his IPO of Lazard has worked out far better than I would have thought.

The author seems more favorably disposed to Rohatyn, Ratner, and Meyer, though there is not enough data about the specific deals they worked on to draw a conclusion.

This is an interesting book that is very well written and that gives some real insight into the workings of a famous Wall Street firm. But it ultimately does not grapple with the larger issues presented by the business or offer any suggestions for change.

A very thorough, though at times sensationalist and gossipy, tale of Wall Street's most intriguing investment house. However, I was sad to see the early history of the firm get short shrift in favor of an intricate string of anecdotes about the personal lives of various senior bankers. In that respect, historians will be largely disappointed but those who enjoy war stories of the rough and tumble 80's and 90's M&A banking environment ala "Barbarians" should enjoy it. Still, it appears that at times that Cohan is almost too eager to dramatize people and events to weave together a compelling story, and in doing so he migrates to a brand of yellow journalism that can be off-putting at times. Nevertheless, the book is generally well-written and captures both the glory and folly of powerful men in a unique and conspicuous way. To call it a comprehensive history, though, would be misleading as it really weights heavy toward the firm of 20 years ago and appears greatly colored by his own personal experience, for better or worse.

Lazard Freres and Co.'s strategy was to offer clients the wisdom of its collection of the finest and most experienced investment bankers, risking no capital of its own. It began as a dry goods store in New Orleans in 1848, moving to San Francisco the next year after a city-wide fire. There it switched to banking in 1876. In 2005 it held an IPO and became publicly held.

"The Last Tycoons" also contains particular emphases on the biography of Felix Rohatyn, "preeminent among Lazard's great men," and the corporate infighting that occurred while Cohan was a broker there.

Unfortunately, we don't learn what Lazard's people did to earn the firm's enormous fees. So, why do we need 752 pages on this topic?

Am about halfway through it and it's more like a popcorn soap opera recounting little petty jealousies. It recounts a few big name deals they firm facilitated with virtually no real deal details. The secret history it ain't.

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.

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

In my personal opinion, the book doesn't flow easily like the book Barbarians at the Gate. This book gets boring after it puts the reader through lots of small details.

I didn't read the book but was listening to the audio book. i'd hope the book is better than the audio. I didn't wish to finish with it. I really got nothing worthwile out of it.

The only thing i could gather was the imnmigration of the family during the war years and the marriages and dowrys and business partner brothers and the internal fighting throughout the family. Was kinda a real headache to listen too.
Not reccommended