Word: rohatyn
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What worries many seasoned professionals is a dangerous contradiction: a bullish investment fever at a time when real-life economic problems like the trade deficit are getting worse. Says Investment Banker Felix Rohatyn: "If the reality doesn't get better but the myth becomes more and more insane, then the correction is going to be more and more violent." While no direct tie exists between stock-market crashes and depressions, a shattering of Wall Street's confidence would deliver a sharp psychological blow to the rest of the population. Adds Rohatyn: "People will only wake up when one morning they...
...Lester Thurow, dean of M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management: "For the U.S., it happens when our debts seem to be unreasonable to the rest of the world relative to our wealth, when we start looking like Brazil." At that point, some unexpected event could trigger a panic. Says Rohatyn: "The cause is utterly unpredictable. Some trading company in Hong Kong will go belly-up, or perhaps a bank in Luxembourg...
...large companies -- a shift toward oligopolies that could already be stifling the very competition that deregulation was supposed to stimulate. Another ominous trend is the increased evidence of corporate corner cutting when it comes to safeguarding the health and safety of workers and customers. Investment Banker Felix Rohatyn, writing in the New York Review of Books, bemoans a "climate of deregulation pushed to dangerous extremes." Result: the beginnings of a blistering debate about the impact of the decontrol era, and a movement to re- regulate. In a growing number of cases, Congress is viewing too much corporate freedom...
...development may be deserved. Many Wall Street firms have imposed unrealistic expectations on their traders and bankers without giving them a solid grounding in old-fashioned ethical values. By pushing salaries and bonuses to outlandish heights, investment firms have turned money into the ultimate measure of success. Declares Felix Rohatyn, senior partner of the investment firm Lazard Freres, in an essay for the New York Review of Books: "Too much money is coming together with too many young people who have little or no institutional memory, or sense of tradition, and who are under enormous pressure to perform...
...knowledge of impending corporate raids, the Boesky scandal heated up the public scrutiny of takeover artists. Economists and other thinkers wondered out loud whether greed had gotten out of control on Wall Street. "This is no longer free enterprise. It's predators on the loose," declared Investment Banker Felix Rohatyn, perhaps the most outspoken critic of corporate raiding. Observers began to describe the era as a time of paper entrepreneurship, in which a lot of stock and money changes hands but no real work gets done to benefit the economy. "In America, industry has become the plaything of finance," said...