The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 16 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Sandler: Drexel collapsed after funding unsold inventory with commercial paper
“What had happened is, to prove they could still get deals done, they were taking a lot of securities that they couldn't sell into inventory, and they were financing it by issuing commercial paper in the commercial paper market. So in financial parlance, they w…”
Sandler: Ivan Boesky did very little trading with Drexel Burnham Lambert
“Ivan Boski was probably the most revered and respected risk arbitrageur on Wall Street. He had accounts with every firm. In fact, he did very little trading with Drexel. He was probably the largest equity buyer of securities of stocks at the time for any firm …”
Sandler: Princeton Newport collapsed before trial under RICO before winning on appeal
“The firm was out of business before the first witness was called in the trial, because under RICO, you could create a freezing of assets, and as a financial institution, that's very, very difficult. So, even though Princeton Newport case was reversed on appeal…”
Milken: Financial firms must make research, not sales, their foundation
“And so my view as the foundation of the firm was research, and we needed to invert the pyramid where research is the foundation of financial investing and advising, then trading, and then if you can trade it and buy it, you can work on selling it.”
Friedman: Drexel and Milken Created the Original New-Issue High-Yield Bond Market
“There was no such thing as a new issue high yield bond before Mike and Drexel. The only high yield bonds were fallen angels, investment grade bonds that had been downgraded.”
Friedman: Drexel's 1980s high-yield market fueled massive private equity expansion
“The first three years that I was there, from 1984 to 1987, were a period of exponential growth, exponential creativity. Explosion in the size of the market that we were creating and the characteristics of it, and explosion in the private equity market because …”
Barber: Every Drexel Burnham lender and equity holder recovered all their money
“And one of the things most people don't know is not only did every lender to Drexel Burnham get all their money back. We, as equity holders got all our money back at the end of the day, it was a short term downturn in the high yield market with too much concen…”
Blood: Major financial firm bankruptcies stem mostly from cultural failures
“Turns out that since I've been in finance now 35 years, there have been, I think, probably 10, 15 major organizations that have gone bankrupt, and they've mostly gone out of business for failures of culture and business principles”
Sandler: Drexel settled federal charges for $650 million in penalties and disgorgement
“They paid a very large fine. I think they paid six hundred and fifty million dollars out. Part of that went as a criminal penalty, and part of that went to as an SEC disgorgement fund, because they settled with both the SEC and the U.S. Attorney”
Milken: Drexel eventually made markets in 7,000 different securities
“So you had to be a market maker, and we eventually made markets in 7000 different securities.”
Apollo was founded to buy distressed assets originally financed by Drexel
“And a firm I eventually went to work for Apollo came out of Drexel, and their business was buying up the assets that they had been the investment bank for that actually raised the money and issued all the junk bonds.”
Friedman: 1990s bond prices collapsed despite an expanding US economy
“The prices get absurdly low on pretty good credits, and it's also a time when the US economy was recovering from a recession in the late eighties, so you had an economy pointed up and bond prices going down, and it made no sense.”
Page: At 25, I pushed Cargill to buy $5M in Drexel bonds
“On my 25 year old recommendation, I bought five million dollars of high yield bonds from what was then Drexel Burnham Lambert.”
Friedman: Drexel Under Milken Taught How to Buy Businesses Without Capital
“I worked in the magical world of Mike Milken in 1984 to 1990, which was just an unbelievable place. It was a great place to learn how to buy a business if you didn't have any money, because we were financing people buying businesses who didn't have that much m…”