Drexel Burnham Lambert
Private banking companyWikipedia
64
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26
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25
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Search complete. 64 mentions across 26 episodes found for "Drexel Burnham Lambert".
Sep 12, 2026
JessicaGUEST
So, let's see, it was early February of 1990.
JessicaGUEST
We all knew that Drexel Burnham, you know, the Mike Milken firm, was in big trouble.
JessicaGUEST
And all of a sudden, Trump announced, everybody come to this luncheon at the Plaza Hotel in And Fred Joseph, the chairman of Drexel, was going to be there and they were going to be talking about the casino industry and all of the new projects in development.
JessicaGUEST
And Fred Joseph and Trump and Ivana, yeah, I sat at their table.
JessicaGUEST
And by the time I got back to the office, it had hit the wire that Drexel Burnham had gone under and was bankrupt to the tune of $650 million.
JessicaGUEST
And about half an hour later, it was announced that Trump had defaulted on his Taj loans.
JessicaGUEST
So he was supposed to make a coupon payment of whatever, $4 or $5 million in January of 1990, and he didn't make it.
Robin WigglesworthGUEST
People have bought bonds unthinkingly.
Robin WigglesworthGUEST
Uh, I mean, Drexel Burnham Lambert, Mike Milken's bank itself went under partially because of some of Mike Milken's shenanigans, but also the fact that they went over their skis on some of these leveraged bonds, these leveraged
Meb FaberHOST
loans and private credit as well back then.
Robin WigglesworthGUEST
And it's a shame for lots of the Drexel people, but they went on to have many great careers elsewhere.
Ali VelshiGUEST
I laud Bill for writing the book, right, and doing this extensive amount of work on, on, on Leon Black.
Ali VelshiGUEST
Look, Leon was the head of corporate finance at Drexel Burnham Lambert-
Bill CohanGUEST
Head of M&A
Ali VelshiGUEST
...
Daniel GamboaHOST
This is the story of how Jay Cook takes on the financing of the Northern Pacific, a massive project core to U.S. grand strategy at the time.
Daniel GamboaHOST
But he ultimately overextends his firm's capital and ends up losing almost everything when liquidity dries up.
Matt HarrisHOST
He actually completed the first major phase of the Northern Pacific Railway.
Matt HarrisHOST
which does eventually get built, and it goes on to become a very strategic and valuable asset to this day, actually.
Daniel GamboaHOST
Yep.
Daniel GamboaHOST
And on top of the clerk job at E.W. Clark, Cook starts writing the money column for the Philadelphia Daily Chronicle.
Daniel GamboaHOST
He's collecting the firm's correspondence during the day and then turning it into a market report at night.
Daniel GamboaHOST
And in September 1840, he writes that anyone who's been watching the banks should be able to see what cost all this, that the crash... was the effect of what he calls wild speculations and imaginary prosperity.
Jamie HulseGUEST
Like, if you read some of the corporate biographies of Ford or Chrysler or whatever, you just sort of hear about some of these stories about how these companies used to live or like, you know, Procter & Gamble.
Jamie HulseGUEST
It's really the, the 1980s and the rise of the corporate raiders, uh, you know, Drexel Burnham Lambert and the, um, the junk bonds which financed the corporate raiders and the rise of private equity and, you know, the Revlon rule, which changed the environment significantly.
Jamie HulseGUEST
And you had stock compensation come in as new theories around corporate governance came in.
Jamie HulseGUEST
And, you know, some might argue it's gone too far in the US where there's this over-focus on quarterly results, and I'd probably agree with that 'cause it tends to be a bit of, fair bit of short-termism.
Patrick BoyleHOST
It is essentially a bank saying, we think we could probably do this if we tried, which is the kind of assurance that has historically done a lot of heavy lifting in transactions of this nature.
Patrick BoyleHOST
The only reason these letters ever meant anything was because in the 1980s, Drexel Burnham Lambert's letters were backed by the credibility of Mike Milken and the entire junk bond market he had created.
Patrick BoyleHOST
TD Securities is a fine Canadian investment bank, but it's not Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1986.
Patrick BoyleHOST
Also, and this is important, GameStop itself cannot support $20 billion of debt.
Patrick BoyleHOST
Its estimated EBITDA is around $469 million, and it already has $4 billion of existing debt.
William CohanGUEST
Uh, turned out that he was very, very good at, uh, what Wall Street did, especially advising, uh, companies on mergers and acquisitions.
William CohanGUEST
He did that at Drexel Burnham, which was, of course, a very powerful firm, especially in the, uh, late '80s, uh, during the reign of, uh, Mike Milken, who of course, uh, someone most people know who he is.
William CohanGUEST
Uh, but then Apa- uh, then Drexel blew up in 1990, uh, actually was liquidated, and Leon sort of corralled a bunch of the best people he could find from, uh, uh, Drexel and started Apollo, which was a private equity firm, uh, so to speak.
William CohanGUEST
Uh, it was, uh, also more than that.
Caleb SilverHOST
He's also the founding partner and a writer at Puck, where he covers Wall Street deal-making and the people who wield power over global finance.
Caleb SilverHOST
His new book, Money to Burn: The Unvarnished Truth about Leon Black, Apollo and the Rise of a New Wall Street, tells a story about how Black, Marc Rowan, and their partners built Apollo out of the ashes of Michael Milken's Drexel Burnham Lambert, and helped turn private equity and private credit into some of the most powerful forces in global finance today.
Caleb SilverHOST
As more of our money moves into these private markets, there's a bigger question: how much risk has moved there with it, and how much of that risk can investors actually see? Bill Cohan joins us now on the Drop In.
Caleb SilverHOST
[rock music]
speaker_0HOST
That loss and reinvention shaped everything that followed.
speaker_0HOST
Black moved into Wall Street, learned mergers and acquisitions at Drexel Burnham, and later helped build Apollo after Drexel collapsed.
speaker_0HOST
And from there, Apollo became a machine for wealth creation.
speaker_0HOST
Absolutely.
Chris NaghibiHOST
It's been around since the late '70s.
Chris NaghibiHOST
And the third thing that happened during this time, and this is the accelerant, Michael Milken and Drexel Burnham Lambert.
Chris NaghibiHOST
Burnham Lambert.
Chris NaghibiHOST
What a great name.
Chris NaghibiHOST
Drexel Burnham Lambert built a functioning market for high-yield debt, something called junk bonds.
Chris NaghibiHOST
Suddenly, you did not need to be investment grade to borrow enormous amounts of money.
Chris NaghibiHOST
You just needed a story and a crafty banker, and then the '80s happened.
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