비즈니스,월스트리트

Strange to say, this book made me feel as though I woke to find myself in a world filled with nothing but slugs, spiders and toxic ooze. The more I read, the more I was sickened by the people I was reading about. None of them seemed actually human – more like … slug carcasses. Creatures I wouldn’t have wished to even touch for fear I’d be infected with whatever disease they carried around with them: rich, fat, soulless, greedy people craving money more than their own humanity.

And it all started with the fat slug at the top of the squirming pile (F. Ross Johnson) who ran a traditional American company, filled with life-long loyal employees: RJR Nabisco, out of Winston Salem. Didn’t like the way the stock failed to rebound after the 1987 crash. Probably would have recovered without any problem if he’d just left things alone. But he didn’t. Instead he decided to take the company private with an LBO (leveraged buy-out). Tried to sneak around behind the company board to do it and screw stockholders by bidding low, assuming no one would sneak in over him. Instead, the story leaked out before he could perform his hatchet job and all hell broke loose.

The rest of the story details the overstuffed, grunting hogs that immediately swarmed to the RJR Nabisco trough, an episode you just stare at (if it is possible to stare while you’re reading), in disgust. Lawyers, bankers and brokers stampeding over each other to get to the money: Shearson Lehman Hutton, Manufacturer’s Hanover, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Salomon Brothers, First Boston and Merrill Lynch, rubber stamping boards of directors, more lawyers, skeletal gold-digging trophy wives, more lawyers, public relations liars, more skeletal gold-digging trophy wives, more lawyers … by the end of this disgusting story you had an uncontrollable urge to lean over the nearest bucket and lose 6 lunches in a row.

As for the life-long, loyal employees who’d devoted their lives to RJR Nabisco? No one in the entire story gave a moment’s thought to any of them, including, I'm sorry to say, the authors. The only thing any of these human hogs saw in front of them were dollar signs, gold, bulging wallets and their standing in the local country club. If they had to destroy the lives of 10,000 people to fill their pockets, so what? They were just … workers. They were irrelevant.

Twenty years pass and here we are again. So the other moral of the story is: no one in Washington or Wall Street has the slightest interest in changing their ways. What a depressing book.

Must read to understand how ego, greed and human factors make up the "invisible hand of the market" ( )

OK, first - this is a truly ripping yarn. There's enough corporate intrigue, maniacal boardroom posturing, gulfstream abuse and small men with big egos in these riveting 600 pages to knock even the Ewing family of Dallas into a cocked hat. From the beginning Burrough draws you into the preposterousness of what is happening, setting out well drawn characterisations of each of the main players, flipping between them in that totally enchanting "meanwhile, in Gotham city" fashion. Before long the threads are pulling together into a whirling tarantella of greed assaulting you from every side. It's difficult to work out who's meant to be the villain, mostly because I think everyone was. Full grown men startle for their utter failure in self-reflexion as much as for the appalling lengths to which they will go in the name of self-interest.
The climax is as good as any thriller (I completely missed my stop on the tube, finally snapping out of a daze thinking, "hey I haven't been this excited since Jodi Foster went head to head with Buffalo Bill in Silence Of The Lambs!").

Secondly, and maybe not intentionally, Barbarians at the Gate is a piercing social/historical commentary - just by "telling it like it was" the narrative skewers the eighties, Wall street and the Reagan years so brutally it might as well be a spit roast.

On this level it is leagues ahead of the celebrated fictional works which purport to do the same thing. In particular, Brett Ellis' "American Psycho", and Tom Wolfe's "A Man in Full", fare badly against Burrough's genuine article. I would be amazed of either Ellis or Wolfe hadn't read this book, but the novels of both are anemic and implausible in comparison. Barbarians at the Gate is more deadly accurate, it doesn't exagerrate or caricature the wall street banker like American Psycho does (and what value is there in caricaturing something which is so patently ridiculous in itself?), and the plot - needless to say - has a ring of credibility which is singularly lacking from A Man In Full.

Oddly, the one area where the book falls down a little bit is in its aspiration (if it has one) to present a sensible, clear, commercial analysis of what was going on. But that's a trade off - had the Burroughs taken that route, then surely some of the dramatic impact would have been lost.

As it is, he's produced a cracker. ( )

Best I've read on LBOs; Wall Street