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

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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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 <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://leadersarereaders.blog/the-last-tycoons-the-secret-history-of-lazard-freres-co/">https://leadersarereaders.blog/the-la...</a>)

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.<br /><br />William D. Cohan’s history of Lazard Freres &amp; Co (the predecessor to the Lazard Ltd now listed on the S&amp;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?<br /><br />Lazard has always prided itself on its image as the supreme Mergers &amp; Acquisition (M&amp;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&amp;A activity, the sector it has helped to pioneer over the last five decades.<br /><br />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&amp;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. <br /><br />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.)<br /><br />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). <br /><br />Though, it takes over 500 pages to ask why M&amp;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.’<br /><br />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&amp;A banking on Wall Street in the post-war years.<br /><br />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&amp;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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />One hopes the onward march of Finance &amp; 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?<br /><br />A genealogy of Citigroup’s origins in banking and insurance would make a good project for his next work.<br />

Subtitled “The Secret History of Lazard Frères &amp; Co. ”, this is the story of simultaneous birth of globe-spanning financial empires and financial mismanagement that could harm millions.

Compelling history of Lazard Frères &amp; Co. <br /><br />If investment banking and the history of big deals fascinate you, getAbstract invites you to sit down with this compelling history of Lazard Frères &amp; 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.<br />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.<br />I am still unable to explain the link between rich men and their love for collecting art.<br />I also found out that rich men have specific places where they hang out.<br />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..<br />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.<br />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...<br />Best chapter for me was "Civil War"...followed by that chapter about a cigarette that was lit and blown...<br />High pressure environments also do have people just die of heart attacks at a very young age....not fair!<br />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.<br /><br />I believe every Corporate lawyer out there or anyone that talks the language of IPO of M&amp;E needs to read this book

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.<br /><br />The book's author has experience in the M&amp;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.

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”.