Word: junks
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...Junk bonds proved to be the ideal weapon for exploiting a weakness in corporate America that raiders were quick to detect. They saw that the stock market valued many large companies at prices well below what their assets would fetch if the companies were bought and broken up. By using junk bonds to build their war chests, takeover artists could pay a premium to shareholders and still hope to make a profit by dismantling a target company...
Lured by the seemingly inexhaustible demand for junk-bond financing, Drexel's Wall Street rivals rushed into the profitable business. The newcomers included such prominent firms as Goldman Sachs, First Boston, Merrill Lynch and Shearson Lehman Hutton. While Drexel's grip on the market gradually slipped, in 1985 it controlled more than half of the new issues. "Drexel is like a god," Michael Boylan, president of the publishing firm Macfadden Holdings, declared in a magazine article that a Drexel executive proudly framed. "They are awesome. You hate to do business against them...
While the huge fine sapped Drexel's strength, the killing stroke was the severe slump in the $200 billion junk-bond market. Several factors -- a rising default rate, a slowing economy and a new federal law requiring S&Ls to dispose of their junk bonds -- conspired to send the prices of such securities plunging to 50% or less of their face value since last fall. Stuck with more than $1 billion in devaluing junk, Drexel's credit rating began sliding, and its banks cut off credit two weeks ago. The parent company, starved for cash, began to siphon money from...
Drexel executives hurriedly moved to sell off the firm's assets, in many cases at fire-sale prices. Drexel attempted to offer whole departments for sale, including Milken's old junk-bond operation in Beverly Hills, but rival firms turned up their noses at anything that might carry legal liabilities or the taint of scandal. The firm's stockholders will get little or nothing, most notably Belgium's Lambert Group, which owned 26% of the firm and may have to take a $92 million write-off. Creditors include Taiyo Mutual Life, a Tokyo firm with a $70 million claim...
...Washington the Government's top economic team stood by with folded arms and watched the company fail. While Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady carefully monitored the situation, the team decided that U.S. financial markets could weather the collapse, in part because junk bonds were already trading near all-time lows. Said an embittered Drexel executive: "What we needed was a pittance, and the Government decided just to let the company go. With a little nudge from the Government, the banks would have put a package together...