Merchants of Debt

Showing how pride, jealousy, fear and ambition fueled Wall Street's debt mania - with consequences that affected hundreds of thousands of people, this book takes the reader behind closed board-room doors to show how ambitious young bankers and ruthless dealmakers changed one another's lives - and the whole American economy. At its peak in the 1980s, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) was a firm that had awesome power. The author shows how KKR dominated the Wall Street scene, acquiring one Fortune 500 company after another, including Safeway, Beatrice Foods, Duracell, Motel 6, and RJR Nabisco. That dominance allows the history of this single firm to tell the story of the undermining of the prudence of American businessmen and the fundamental soundness of the economy. Bankers and money managers stopped financing highways and factories and instead lent billions to KKR to pay for high-debt acquisitions. As companies then laboured to pay off their debt loads, growth suffered, vital capital investments were deferred and technological innovation was foreclosed. In short, the flirtation with daredevil debt, Anders argues, silently took its toll on US economic strength.