Word: deale
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Nabisco, the benefits of LBOs were hardly lost on Johnson. Born in Winnipeg, Man., he had parlayed a keen eye for a deal and the nerves of a gunslinger into the top job at three major corporations. He was president of Standard Brands, the producer of Planters nuts and Baby Ruth candy bars, when it merged with Nabisco in 1981. Four years later, as Nabisco's president, Johnson sold out to RJR Reynolds for $4.9 billion and soon became president of the merged company. After adding the title of chief executive officer in 1987, he swiftly moved RJR Nabisco headquarters...
Whoever wins the grab for RJR, a highly leveraged takeover could add more debt to the U.S. economy than any previous business deal. All told, corporate debt has climbed from some $965 billion in 1982 to $1.8 trillion this year, a rise from 32% to 37% of U.S. gross national product. LBOs can be especially worrisome of borrowing, because they replace virtually all of a company's equity with IOUs that must be repaid. A sudden downturn can thus put a firm heavily in hock out of business. "High leverage is unsafe, not just for a company...
...deal also raises the salary competition among executives to absurd levels. Says John Swearingen, former chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana: "There is a limit to what managers ought to be paid for managing other people's money." Adds a top executive involved in a current takeover: "The yardstick for compensation has just gotten twelve inches longer. The chief executive who's doing a first-class job running a major U.S. corporation for $890,000 a year is going to start thinking he's some kind of a fool...
...riches has, for the moment at least, given overreaching a bad name. In the end, the RJR brouhaha may turn out to be a useful testing of the limits: of greed, of debt, of dealmaking. The resulting outcry may prove an effective regulating device. "In its own way, the deal has been typically American, where nothing is in moderation, including the enormous selfishness of management," notes James Bere, chairman of Borg-Warner. "It's touched a nerve. Sometimes we have to do things in extremes before we can put the total in perspective." Without that perspective, the wages of greed...
Those who like their fiction accompanied by a good deal of bookish impedimenta will find almost more than they can handle in Dictionary of the Khazars. Not only does it pretend to reassemble and update its imaginary 1691 predecessor, but it also comes in two forms, a male and a female edition, which differ in only one passage of just under 15 lines of text. Most astonishingly, this novel, translated from the original Serbo-Croatian, has ) become a best seller in France and Germany; its Yugoslav author, Milorad Pavic, 59, a professor of literary history at the University of Belgrade...