Merchants of Debt: KKR and the Mortgaging of American Business

Description

For more than a decade, Henry Kravis and George Roberts have been archetypes, first of Wall Street’s boom years and then of its excesses. Their story and that of their firm, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.-the biggest, most successful and most controversial participant in the age of leverage-illuminates an entire era of financial maneuvering and speculative mania. Kravis and Roberts concocted one giant takeover after another through leveraged buyouts, including Fortune 500 companies Safeway, Duracell, Motel 6 and RJR Nabisco. The story of KKR shows how pride, jealousy, fear and ambition fueled Wall Street’s debt mania with consequences that affected hundreds of thousands of people. Here in this gripping saga that takes you behind closed boardroom doors to show how star-struck young bankers, ruthless deal-makers and nervous CEOs changed one another’s lives and the whole American economy over a fifteen-year span.