By Adam
Seligman. Free Press. 241 pp. $24.95
By Philip Gleason. Johns Hopkins, 314 pp. $40
By Eugene S. Morton and Jake Page.
Random House. 275 pp. $22
Modern poetry has a reputation for being difficult. It's hard to follow, harder still to scan, and there's almost no way to memorize it. The last job is so hard it gives you the impression that modem poetry doesn't want to be remembered, doesn't want to be poetry in the traditional sense.
extension to manage, American business. That search, J. Bradford De Long argues, has been a hap- less departure from sound beginnings; Roy C. Smith, however, con- tends that it has helped to create a more competitive U.S. economy.
J. Bradford De Long
hey control the people
through the people's own
money," thundered future
Supreme Court Justice
Louis Brandeis in 1913.
Brandeis, then a Boston corporate lawyer and an adviser to Presi- dent Woodrow Wilson, was trying through a series of a...
arning ignored: This 1921 cartoon showed Wall Street operators fishing for suckers.
WQ AUTUMN 1992 16
A ican Finance
Michael Milken, the erstwhile junk-bond king who is now serving time in a federal prison, will likely go down in history as a symbol of the sins of the 1980sÃ?â??greed excess, and worse. Yet he also was the most significant figure in American corporate finance since J. P. Morgan. From Morgan's time to Milken's, financiers have sought the best way to finance, and b...
Roy C. Smith
he event will be long re-membered in the history of financial delirium. On the weekend of March 16, 1985, some 2,000 well- heeled "players" began de- scending on the Beverly Hills Hilton for the sixth annual Predators' Ball, sponsored by 38-year-old junk-bond impresario Michael Milken of Drexel Burnham Lambert. The assembled guests included oilman T. Boone Pickens and a growing list of other corporate "raiders," individual investors such as Saul Steinberg, and money...
agreeing to locate the new national capital far from the perfidious money men of New York City, on the banks of the "Potoumac." And there in the national capital, two centuries later, the thread might end in today's recrimina- tions over the treatment of the "moneyed inter- ests" in the savings-and-loan crisis and other af- fairs. Between these two points the narrative would wind through the battles over the first and second national banks, the memorable as- sault on the "cross...
. On the comer of La Huerta Road was a miniature Rhine castle with tarpaper turrets pierced for archers. Next to it was a highly colored shack with domes and minarets out of the Arabian Nights. Again he was charitable. Both houses were comic, but he didn't laugh. Their desire to startle was so eager and guileless. It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly...