Word: junks
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During the heyday of takeover lending and junk-bond financing, the patrician investment firm Morgan Stanley was often the butt of ridicule. While more aggressive firms plunged into risky new techniques, Morgan, despite a leading role in corporate takeovers, seemed stuck in its stodgy habit of underwriting stock for blue-chip companies and selling investment-grade bonds. The new breed was playing high-stakes Monopoly, the joke went, while the stuffed shirts at Morgan were playing Trivial Pursuit. But no one is laughing at Morgan's expense anymore. The firm, founded in 1935, is the most profitable on Wall Street...
...Morgan dodge the slump? While the firm handled a sizable share of leveraged buyouts and issued $14 billion in junk bonds during the late 1980s, the company chose its deals with care. (Morgan did come up short in one notable fight, however, when it assisted Paramount Communications in its failed $12.2 billion hostile bid for Time Inc. last year on the eve of the company's planned merger with Warner Communications.) Under Chairman S. Parker Gilbert, 56, the stepson of co-founder Harold Stanley, and President Richard Fisher, 53, Morgan hedged its bets by diversifying into many different fields rather...
...echo carried that far and beyond. Drexel's notorious junk bonds -- debt instruments that pay high rates of interest because of the relative shakiness of the ventures they fund -- turned the financial world topsy-turvy and helped set the tone for the money lust that gripped America in the '80s. Armed with the bonds, corporate raiders swiftly raised the money they needed to attack even the largest companies. At the same time, investment bankers raked in billions of dollars by advising the raiders and selling junk bonds to eager borrowers. In what corporate America saw as a glorified protection racket...
Potentially more worrisome is a different kind of credit contraction, a cyclical one. In the gaga '80s, lenders used practically every debt instrument imaginable. Junk bonds were issued in an almost endless variety of complex forms. The consumer got into the act as well. Home-equity loans and lines of credit, which are basically latter-day relatives of the second mortgages that led to so many foreclosures in the 1930s, rose from $20 billion in 1985 to $75 billion in 1988. At the same time, creditors lengthened maturities. The average auto loan is now payable over 48 months, up from...
...securities have been hit harder than junk bonds. The $200 billion market fell 7% in value during the last quarter of 1989. It suffered another blow last week when the credit-rating agency Moody's suddenly downgraded some debt issued by RJR Nabisco, which went private in a $25 billion buyout last year. The RJR securities had been viewed as among the most solid junk bonds. But investors were quick to flee; in two days, many RJR bonds lost $200 for each $1,000 of face value...