Word: shearson
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...embodied Wall Street's gold-rush spirit of the 1980s more than Peter Cohen, the high-strung chairman of the 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...
...stress on Cohen increased, his composure frayed. Colleagues reportedly heard him yelling over the phone at his boss, American Express Chairman James Robinson III. At one point, Cohen even had his offices at Shearson swept for listening devices. When Robinson pressured Cohen for his resignation last week, the Shearson chief complied. As Robinson told TIME: "The conditions of the market, the problems on Wall Street, all of ((the firm's woes)) led to Peter's feeling that his own identification had been linked to so many of the problems that he could not provide the ongoing leadership that the firm...
...graduate of Columbia Business School, Cohen had planned to enter the family business but changed his mind when his father offered him only half the going rate for M.B.A.s, then $12,000 a year. Eventually Cohen joined a brokerage firm named CWBL- Hayden, Stone, one of the forerunners of Shearson. By 1983, Cohen had been named chief executive of Shearson, making him, at 36, the youngest head of a major Wall Street firm...
Cohen was determined to build a firm that would rival Merrill Lynch in size. In 1984 he orchestrated a $360 million merger between Shearson/American Express and Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb. That move catapulted Shearson into the immensely profitable investment-banking business. But signs of stress began to appear in the wake of the 1987 stock-market crash, when Shearson paid nearly $1 billion to acquire E.F. Hutton. Dozens of top-notch Hutton brokers defected to other investment firms. At the same time, the firm suffered dwindling business from individual investors, on whom Shearson was still heavily dependent. Cohen, meanwhile...
...Berlin commercials are among an outpouring of ads in which Western businesses seem to be welcoming Eastern Europe into the capitalist world. A Shearson Lehman Hutton commercial shows Slavic women wearing U.S. running shoes and a teenager riding a skateboard past a hammer-and-sickle sculpture. The tactics have even been adopted by the other side: one of the products to extol improved East-West relations in its ads is Stolichnaya, the Russian vodka...