Word: 80s
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Already, unsolicited bids--the preferred '80s raider weapon--are on the rise. The value of these bids more than doubled last year, to $5 billion, reports Thomson Financial. Meanwhile, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, which became a household name with its $25 billion takeover of RJR Nabisco in 1989, is in the process of raising $6 billion, its largest pool ever for deals...
...course, a few key '80s players never went away. Bottom fisher Sanford Weill, for one, amassed an impressive array of financial companies on the cheap while others were getting tech-obsessed. He is now the head of Citigroup, one of the world's largest banks. Icahn, the '80s raider who shook Texaco and took TWA, has asserted influence in small doses throughout the '90s by buying large amounts of distressed corporate debt, as has former Milken colleague Leon Black at Apollo Advisors...
Irwin Jacobs, whose '80s buyout/bust-up raids on AMF, Kaiser Steel and Enron, among others, helped win him the nickname "Irv the Liquidator," has changed his style and gone back to work in this new climate. Last year he bought nearly 5% of the all-but-dead insurer Conseco--some 16 million shares, at about $7 each. Jacobs helped install former GE star Gary Wendt as CEO, and with Conseco now trading at $16, he has a paper profit of $144 million...
...mathematics of obtaining capital has been the single biggest obstacle to the raiders' staging a full-fledged return, says Howard Marks, chairman of Oaktree Capital Management. "Buyout firms were able to purchase venerable U.S. icons in the '80s because they could borrow 20 times their money," he notes. (Remember those "highly confident" letters, as in, "I'm highly confident I can borrow the money to take over your company, bub," that Milken and pals used so effectively to terrorize CEOs?) "If you wanted to buy a company for $10 billion, you could probably do it on $400 million in equity...
Leverage--popularized in the '80s as OPM (other people's money)--is what makes LBOs work. Think of it like this: You buy a house for $200,000 with 20% down, or $40,000. Say you later sell the house for $400,000. Your profit is $200,000 on a $40,000 investment. That's a fivefold return on a property that merely doubled in value. Now imagine the math if you put down only 5%, which is how raiders did it in the '80s...