Word: milken
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Wall Street the debt-propelled takeover binge gave rise to the era's get- rich-quick mentality. Michael Milken, the deposed Drexel guru who pioneered junk bonds and nurtured them into a $200 billion market, was paid $550 million in 1987 for his unrivaled expertise. In a perverse version of the trickle-down theory, lower-echelon bankers raked in multimillion-dollar salaries, and new recruits with two years' experience earned six-figure sums. The fantastic payoff created a brain drain as the best and the brightest from top colleges and business schools across the U.S. flocked to Wall Street...
UNLIKELY is a very 90s thing to be. Until recently, it was very declasse; the last decade was all about winners, not losers; it was about the sure bet and not the slim chance. The Mets were cool; the Pirates were not. Michael Milken was cool; New York City vagrants were (according to their mayor) definitely not. Defense spending was cool; fighting drugs seriously...
...good news is that lots of people prospered. This was the age of financial wizards making fortunes in their 20s, and roughly 100,000 Americans became millionaires every year. Michael Milken, the junk-bond king at Drexel Burnham Lambert, set the record by earning $550 million in 1987. The bad news is that while the top 20% of American families' earnings rose more than $9,000 (after adjustment for inflation), to an average of nearly $85,000, the bottom 20% dropped by $576, to a hungry $8,880. The Government estimates that 32 million Americans -- 12.8% of the population -- live...