Word: 80s
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While titans tangled for the last of the megadeals, the ranks of their troops were shrinking drastically in the last years of the '80s. Merrill Lynch, which lost $213 million in 1989, last month announced plans to let 3,000 of its 41,000 employees go by the end of this year. The bleak job outlook deters business-school students who a few years ago might have eagerly aspired to investment-banking jobs. "A lot of people are shying away from Wall Street because the jobs are not there," says Mike Russell, 25, editor of the Harvard Business School newspaper...
...outdone, Wall Street's investment bankers are lining up for their share of the money to be made from the wreckage of the '80s. Observes Robert Reich, professor of political economy and management at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government: "Much of the impetus behind the leveraged buyouts was to bust up companies that were frantically put together in the '70s. Many times it was the same investment bankers and lawyers who then proceeded to take them apart in the '80s. In the '90s these same teams will work on reducing debt loads to strengthen core businesses...
...takeover fevers that racked the '80s have already begun to abate. The total number of U.S. mergers and acquisitions plunged 14% last year, to 3,412 deals, and is now declining at a brisker rate. Only 165 transactions were completed last month, down 56% from January 1989. "The big-fee merger and acquisition game is pretty much over," says Donald Ratajczak, director of the Economic Forecasting Center at Georgia State University. "There are still going to be deals, but nothing like we saw in the '80s...
...those who believed in the verities of the '80s -- that greed is good, that one can never be too rich or too thin, and that abstinence and exercise will lead to eternal life -- the new decade spells trying times. Mike Tyson's crown has toppled, and the Trumps have split. Oat bran is no panacea; Drexel is bankrupt. "I suspect," says editor E. Graydon Carter, 40, co-founder of Spy magazine, "that when they find red suspenders cause back problems, that will be the final nail in the yuppie coffin...
...crucial. How, after all, does % a company persuade a population that the presence of a few bubbles transforms the most common substance on earth into a fashion statement? With its reverent ads and fitness-cult following, Perrier won a unique niche in the psyche and vocabulary of the '80s. "People ask for Perrier when they want mineral water," says Dan Rose, a bartender at an uptown Manhattan restaurant, "the same way they ask for Kleenex when they want a tissue. Perrier has come to mean mineral water." Riding the decade's fitness fad, sales jumped 190% in seven years...