Word: 80s
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Doesn't anyone have a kind word for Wall Street's gilded '80s? The new decade is only six weeks old, and already stores are piled high with books that portray the past ten years as a sink of avarice and excess. The melodramatic titles depict the American free-enterprise system as overrun by barbarians and liars, ambition and greed. And readers are lapping it all up. Just as they reveled in stories of the rich and famous during the past decade, today's inquiring minds are hungry for colorful tales about the pratfalls of the mighty...
...once wrote in an ode to a friend, "Yet really we had the same life, the generic one/ our generation offered." In much the same way, these tales of the 1980s tend to merge into one generic portrait of vanity, ego and greed. Historians may come to see the '80s in a kinder and more diverse light, but the image of the decade in these books is unquestionably the prevailing one today...
Potentially more worrisome is a different kind of credit contraction, a cyclical one. In the gaga '80s, lenders used practically every debt instrument imaginable. Junk bonds were issued in an almost endless variety of complex forms. The consumer got into the act as well. Home-equity loans and lines of credit, which are basically latter-day relatives of the second mortgages that led to so many foreclosures in the 1930s, rose from $20 billion in 1985 to $75 billion in 1988. At the same time, creditors lengthened maturities. The average auto loan is now payable over 48 months, up from...
...investment firm Shearson Lehman Hutton. A short, cigar-smoking firebrand, Cohen transformed Shearson from a stolid retail brokerage into an investment-banking giant. Backed by American Express, which bought the firm for $360 million in 1981, Shearson grew from 11,000 employees to 47,000 by the mid-'80s. But Cohen's expansion drive proved unstable. Hurt by several missteps and the slowing pace of Wall Street dealmaking, Shearson's investment-banking revenue declined 27% last year, to $963 million...
...debt was the height of fashion during the Roaring Eighties, it has become, just one month into the 1990s, painfully passe. The securities issued by companies that loaded up on leverage to do deals during the '80s are now taking their lumps on Wall Street as investors shift their money to less- indebted companies...