读David Carey / John E. Morris《King of Capital》

Peterson在Lehman的经历。Peterson had allies within Lehman, mostly bankers, but few of the firm‘s three dozen partners were his steadfast friends.In the 1960s, conglomerates‘ stocks sometimes traded at multiples of forty times earnings—far above the historical average for public companies. They used their overvalued tock and some merger arithmetic to inflate their earnings per share, which is a key measure or investors.The brainchild of a young banker there named Michael Milken, the new financing was politely called high-yield debt but was universally known as the junk bond, or junk for short.Carl Icahn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_IcahnIcahn was raised in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York City, where he attended Far Rockaway High School.[2] His father was a cantor, his mother was a schoolteacher.[3] He was educated at Princeton University (A.B., philosophy, 1957) and New York University School of Medicine, but left without graduating.Icahn began his career on Wall Street in 1961. In 1968, he formed Icahn & Co., a securities firm that focused on risk arbitrage and options trading. In 1978, he began taking control of positions in individual companies.[2] He has taken substantial or controlling positions in various corporations including RJR Nabisco, TWA, Texaco, Phillips Petroleum, Western Union, Gulf & Western, Viacom, Uniroyal, Dan River, Marshall Field's, E-II (Culligan and Samsonite), American Can, USX, Marvel Comics, Revlon, Imclone, Federal-Mogul, Fairmont Hotels, Blockbuster, Kerr-McGee, Time Warner and Motorola.It was the same cautious approach to risking money that would become a hallmark of Blackstone‘s investing style—and helps explain why Blackstone avoided the kind of brazen, outsized gambles that caused some high-flying rivals to run aground.对于资本的精心运用。Schwarzman says. ―We wanted to be in businesses where we could either drive very high assets per employee or operate with very high margins.‖Schwarzman acknowledges as much. ―We are more risk-averse than other private equity firms, and part of it is visceral. I don‘t like failure, and losing money is failing. It‘s a personal thing that has turned into a strategy here.‖blackstone在87年股灾时完成募资恰逢其时。Mossman sketched an imaginary worst case. He assumed that steel volume tumbled to its lowest point in twenty years and stayed there for two years. He showed that, even then, the railroad and barge unit would be able to meet its costs and turn a profit. ―James did a perfect analysis,‖ says Schwarzman.通过模型和恶劣情形评估来发掘投资机会。Starting with essays he wrote for the New York Times and the New York Review of Books, and an article in the October 1987 Atlantic that won a National Magazine Award, Peterson took to blasting away at Washington‘s spendthrift ways and its addiction to raising money by selling treasury bonds to foreigners. He extended his crusade to speeches and books. The thrust of his argument was that the ballooning federal debt inevitably would sap America‘s competitiveness in the world economy.Peterson对于美国外债过多的猛烈抨击在今天看来是非常睿智的。―Steve asked me how it went with Pete. I told him I don‘t think Pete had heard a word I said. So Steve called up Pete at home and asked him what I‘d said. Pete was able to repeat all of it, virtually verbatim.‖Schwarzman在DLJ的日子相当失意。Schwarzman ―always has a few off-the-cuff zingers that leave heads shaking,‖ says a limited partner who was there.Schwarzman ―always has a few off-the-cuff zingers that leave heads shaking,‖ says a limited partner who was there.In July, KKR did the only thing it could do to stave off bankruptcy: It doubled down, investing another $1.7 billion of equity to bail out RJR as part of a debt refinancing.The profit split was not what pushed the men apart, says an investment banker who is a friend of Peterson‘s, but rather values and style. ―With Pete, it wasn‘t the money. Money didn‘t matter to Pete the way it did to Steve,‖ says the banker, who describes Peterson‘s material cravings as modest, certainly by Schwarzman‘s standards. ―What eventually got to Pete was Steve‘s lifestyle, his flashing his wealth, his drawing attention to himself. That‘s not what Pete is about.‖―Pete doesn‘t believe the point of making money is to let everyone know you made it,‖ says a second person, who knows them both well. ―Steve doesn‘t have a problem with that.‖Though to this day both tout their relationship as ―the longest-lasting partnership on Wall Street,‖ by the 2000s their relations were frayed and they carped about each other to friends. Schwarzman would grumble about Peterson still collecting millions but contributing little, while Peterson would snipe about Schwarzman‘s crass displays of wealth.―James saw the world in black and white,‖ says Kenneth Whitney, a longtime Blackstone partner. Mossman‘s personality was similarly split, Whitney says. ―He had a great sense of humor, but as soon as he focused on something, he turned very serious. It was like Jekyll and Hyde.‖ He had an obsessive-compulsive side, sometimes going two or three days without sleepwhen immersed in a deal. Says Whitney: ―He had the kind of personality that only had one speed, full speed ahead.‖James Mossman是个高手Callahan was only the biggest failure. Two-thirds of the investments Blackstone made in 2000, at the height of the market, were wipeouts. The write-offs were an object lesson in the dangers of wagering on companies in a frothy market—a lesson that would echo again when the credit markets crashed in 2007 and the economy began spiraling downward.Lee, who had spent his career in far larger, more mature institutions, felt he could contribute immediately. ―Most private equity firms had grown up like little, boutiquey law firms,‖ Lee says. ―The partners sat around and said, ‗Let‘s do that deal, let‘s do this deal.‘ There was no structure, no infrastructure, no HR, no risk management. But by the year 2000 they‘d been at it for fifteen years and they knew they were ratcheting up their activity level. They were going global. A lot was going on。CSFB had greatly overpaid for DLJ at the top of the market, and many of DLJ‘s biggest rainmakers, who had pocketed millions from the sale of their DLJ shares, had left soon after the merger. Some at CSFB blamed James for inducing CSFB to pay so much and then letting the talent slip away.While Schwarzman vacationed at his homes in the traditional playgrounds of the super rich—the Hamptons on Long Island, Palm Beach in Florida, and St. Tropez in France, or on his yacht in the Caribbean—James was a die-hard fly fisherman who tied his own flies and ventured up the Amazon and to Mongolia on fishing trips with his friend David Bonderman, the iconoclastic founder of TPG.They shared a conviction that they were looking at the opportunity of a decade to buy assets cheaply.一定要把资金保留在有便宜资产的时候。―You‘ve got to have a lot of respect for the cycles,‖ Chu says, looking back. ―No matter how smart an investor you are and no matter how great the company and its management team are, if you invested in U.S. or European chemicals in 2007 and exited in 2010, you‘d take a loss.‖By the 2000s, lending syndicates and bond financing were merging through a process known as securitization. Banks still made loans up front, but rather than divvying them up with other banks, they bundled them with scores of loans to other companies and sold slices of those bundles to investors. The process was known as securitization because it repackaged loans as widely sold securities similar to bonds or stocks.Schwarzman wasn‘t sure at first if the offer was worth the potential complication and delay of negotiating a side deal, but the Chinese offered to invest $3 billion and their terms turned out to be simple. All they wanted was the chance to buy in without paying the investment banks‘ fees and commissions. They didn‘t seek any special access to information beforehand or a seat on Blackstone‘s board, and they agreed to keep the stake under 10 percent so that the investment didn‘t have to go through a national security review in the United States. In addition, their shares would be nonvoting.On May 20, barely three weeks after Leung first spoke to CIC‘s head, Lou Jiwei, on April 30, a deal was signed for CIC to invest through a subsidiary optimistically named Beijing Wonderful Investments, Ltd. One person familiar with CIC calculated that in those three weeks of talks China accumulated $15 billion in new reserves and so he figured that its managers were just too busy putting out their money to haggle.中投的急于接盘让黑石占了大便宜。―I said I wanted to be able to look my partners in the eye,‖ Peterson says. ―What I get in liquidity they don‘t get.‖ After he unloaded shares in the IPO, Peterson‘s stake in the firm would drop to 4.2 percent, and he confirmed that he would formally retire from Blackstone at the end of 2008. Schwarzman would be left with 23.3 percent, James with 4.9 percent.As it happened, June 11 was the day that Blackstone finally revealed Schwarzman‘s pay: $398.3 million in 2006 alone. The figure was mind-boggling. It was nine times what Lloyd Blankfein, Schwarzman‘s counterpart at Goldman Sachs, made that year in cash and stock, though Goldman had thirty times as many employees and was universally acknowledged to be the most successful firm on Wall Street. Schwarzman‘s pay was twice what the top five executives at Goldman together took home. It attested to the profits private equity was churning out and revealed how rich Schwarzman had become owing to his nearly 30 percent stake in Blackstone.―If we don‘t reinvent ourselves continually, we‘re dead,‖ Schwarzman likes to tell his troops. At the end of the day, there are thousands of sources of pure capital. The trick is to supply something extra.