Word: weill
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...dramatic engine of Tearing Down the Walls, Monica Langley's biography of Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill, is his lifelong struggle for acceptance among Wall Street's elite. What a burden, we are repeatedly reminded, was Weill's background as a rumply Jewish kid from Brooklyn, N.Y.--he's even the wrong kind of Jew!--as he fought to overcome anti-Semitism and class prejudice to make it to the top, not once but twice. It's a nice story line but a somewhat artificial...
Whatever social obstacles the Cornell-educated Weill faced when he hit Wall Street in 1955, he had built a respectable brokerage in Cogan, Berlind, Weill & Levitt by 1969. He then swallowed Shearson, Hayden Stone and other houses before selling the whole shebang in 1981 to American Express. By 1985, when Weill lost a power struggle with white-bread Amex CEO James D. Robinson III and was ousted as president, it wasn't because Weill was Jewish. He was just outmaneuvered. And he left as a multimillionaire. It's difficult for Langley to set a good sob story at Weill...
...matter. What Langley, a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter, does give us in this book is a richly reported recent history of Wall Street and corporate America told through an oversize personality. Weill is a gregarious man with a blowtorch temper and a need to be loved. And he is a window on the shareholder revolt against corporate bloat that raged through the 1980s...
When deregulation came to Wall Street in 1975, Weill found his weapon. Fixed 15% commissions were history and soon, too, were some of the old brokerage battleships that had stayed upright with that ballast. Weill and his partners Roger Berlind, Arthur Carter and, later, Arthur Levitt torpedoed one competitor after another because they were better stock pickers and better managers...
After the Amex embarrassment, Weill and his band of mercenaries took over Baltimore's Commercial Credit Co. (CCC), a substandard subprime lender, then used CCC to go after bigger and bigger deals until they got to Citicorp. The bottom line wasn't the main thing; it was the only thing. As Langley shows, in Weill's world, anything that didn't produce revenue was gone. No perks were too small to eliminate...