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.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
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This review is from: Merchants of Debt: Kkr and the Mortgaging of American Business With a New Afterword by the Author (Paperback)
This book covers the largest and probably the best of the leveraged buyout firms that became so popular and profitable in the 80's. What I would like to say is that this was an outstanding book that is the leader of the class on this topic. You get a wonderfully documented and rich description of the group of high finance leaders during the 80's Junk Bond and M&A scandals. The author also provides a very readable explanation of the tools used in both the legitimate and illegal side of this issue. This is just a detailed and exciting book; the extra pages and detail do not slow it down at all. The personal descriptions of the people behind the "KKR" names is very interesting, it is something that many massive ego's could actually work together even if they are family.If you are interested in this topic then I would suggest you also read "Predator's Ball" and "Den of Thieves". If you read only one book on this topic then this is the book to read.
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