Description
Bloodsport is the story of how the mania for corporate deals and mergers all started. The riveting tale of how power lawyers Joe Flom and Marty Lipton, major Wall Street players Felix Rohatyn and Bruce Wasserstein, prominent jurists, and shrewd ideologues in academic garb provided the intellectual firepower, creativity, and energy that drove the corporate elite into a less cozy, Hobbesian world.
With total dollar volume within the trillions, the zeal for the deal continues unabated to nowadays. Underpinning this explosion in mergers and acquisitionsincluding hostile takeoversare four questions that radically disrupted corporate ownership within the 1970s, whose force remains undiminished:
Are shareholders the sole owners” of corporations and the legitimate source of power?
Should keep an eye on be exercised by autonomous CEOs or is their assumption of power illegitimate and inefficient?
Is the main purpose of the corporation to generate jobs and create prosperity for the masses and the nation?
Or is it simply to maximize the wealth of shareholders?
This battle of ideas changed into the bloodsport” of American business. It set in motion the deal-making culture that led to the financialization of the economy and it’s the backstory to ongoing debates over competitiveness, job losses, inequality, stratospheric executive pay, and who owns” The united states’s corporations.