Felix

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Fri Sep 10 14:42:49 PDT 1999


Carl Remick wrote:


>Hmm, did Felix Rohatyn furnish that "one voice" ... or did his role
>as head of the Municipal Assistance Corporation mean that he
>functioned as the "ears"?

He was a lot more than ears. If capital ever has a lead voice, he was probably it.


> Have always had a tough time figuring out Felix the Fixer's exact
>role, in all his incarnations.

From a book on Wall Street:

<quote> One of [the liberals'] favorite voices of outrage was a Wall Streeter, the soulful banker, Felix Rohatyn, whose position presumably gave him some authority, an authority that couldn't survive a serious confrontation with his resume. Rohatyn author of tedious, moralizing pieces in the New York Review of Books, supplier of sermon-like quotes to press hacks, failed perennial Democratic candidate for Treasury Secretary, and now something of a has-been was actually the inspiration for one of the 1980s' dashingest figures, Joe Perella. Perella, partner with Bruce "Bid 'em Up" Wasserman in one of the great buyout machines of the time, told Institutional Investor in 1984: "I saw Felix knocking off those mergers at $1 million a clip, with no capital. I was impressed not only with his skill but also by the sheer potential of M&A fees." Felix, together with his mentor Andre Meyer, put together ITT and other great 1960s conglomerates at Lazard Freres. Rohatyn and Meyer helped turn Steve Ross from a parking-lot operator into the capo of Warner Bros.

Lazard was the first to break the $1 million banking fee, but Meyer wanted nothing to do with the mundane business of underwriting securities to finance real companies; he liked playing with whole companies better. In 1963, Meyer, "with his taste for the sure thing," bought a French company operating in Wyoming named, appropriately enough, Franco Wyoming, liquidated it and fired all the employees and practically overnight made a 300% profit. A name-brand investment bank bought a company, busted it up, and got away with a huge profit and its reputation intact; this was a lesson not lost on Wall Street (Reich 1983, pp. 243-247).

Later, Rohatyn would denounce such practices and urge the creation of a Reconstruction Finance Corporation to retool America. A dealmaker who did virtually nothing to fund productive investment, Rohatyn frequently urged the government to take on the mundane business of industrial finance, clearly too demeaning a task for the sophisticates of Wall Street. As the novelist-polemicist Michael Thomas put it (personal communication), Felix pounds the pulpit with one hand and endorses checks with the other. </quote>

Doug



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