who could he deliver? let me ask you this. levine was a fish, boesky was a shark. who is the whale they re going to catch? i don t know. drexel burnham? well, that s possible. in the middle of all this is drexel burnham lambert. until a few years ago, a little-known wall street firm. then it shot to the top of this high-stakes world by specializing in so-called junk bonds. high interest but also high risk. drexel and the head of its junk bond department michael milken made a deal with ivan boesky to make millions of dollars illegally. for example, california company wicks came to milken s firm and said it was planning a takeover. he then whispered that secret to boesky in new york. boesky bought the stock before it went up, shared the profits with milkens firm, but milken betrayed his client, charged a million-dollar fee and secretly earned $6.5 million more at the clients expense. authorities are worried that
it was milken s genius that created an entire market and fueled this takeover phenomena. we romanticize these characters. the fact of the matter is, these are fat cats, first cousins to the financial manipulators, the robert barons in the late 19th century. these guys are out there, trying to make a buck doing nothing and are putting people out of work. economists agree that some unemployment, some hardship is unavoidable in the vital process of making the united states lean and mean again, what the takeover specialists call corporate restructuring. corporate america needs some kick now and then to become a little more efficient and less entrenched. and that will probably do our economy a lot of good. thursday, goodyear fended off a hostile takeover bid but victory didn t come cheap. goodyear won by buying back roughly half its stock and taking on a huge debt. plants were closed and workers laid off. the company pays $1 million a day in interest to 17 banks worldwide.
american taxpayers. mr. keating, can you make bail? no questions. the once rapid growth of keating s failed lincoln savings and loan in california, the had uninsured and worthless bonds. the majority bought by seniors, many losing their life savings. charles keating was convicted in two trials, but both of those verdicts were overturned, and then he pled guilty to avoid a retrial and was allowed out for time served. the climate had gone from celebrating the excesses of wall street to condemning them pretty quickly. mr. milken? tonight s headline, milken pleads guilty in what may be the largest individual case of fraud ever to rock wall street. the case which ended in a plea bargain with the government.
some of the dialogue. greed is good. greed is right. greed works. when michael douglas in the movie said greed is good, there s a cartoon expression. but there s truth to it. there was a sense that it is okay to be greedy. it is okay to maximize your wealth. what i want to see above all is that this country remains a country where someone can always get rich. big companies gobbling up little companies. little companies gobbling up big companies. eight years ago, there were 1,500 corporate takeovers. last year there were 4,000 involving $200 billion. this type of deal is called a leveraged buyout. the company borrows the money, using its assets as collateral for the loan. in return, the company issues ious. because it s so risky, those ious carry high interest rates, and they re called junk bonds. you may not have heard of michael milken of the investing
firm but this 40-year-old wall street whiz is said to be the most powerful financier in america. he brought respectability to low rated junk bonds and then used the money to finance corporate raids and takeovers. without mike milken, pickens couldn t have raided gulf, and phillips. he said if you really want to take over gulf, it s going to cost you $13 billion. i said, yeah, i get it. and he said, i can get the $13 billion. he s the guy that t. boone pickens goes to and most people haven t heard of him. that s the way he likes it. he doesn t care about publicity he doesn t care about pride. all he cares about is making money, doing deals and having power. he was this shadowy howard hughs like figure that those of us in the press never saw, you just heard. it s milken.