Böcker av Robert Sobel

The Rise and Fall of the Conglomerate Kings is the behind-the-scenes story of the financial wizards and bare-knuckled businessmen who created the conglomerates, the glamorous multiform companies that marked the high noon of post-World War II American capitalism. Covering the period from the end of the war to 1983, Robert Sobel explains why and how the conglomerate movement originated, how it mushroomed, and what caused its startling and rapid decline. He chronicles how the era gave rise to a cadre of imaginative, bold, and often ruthless entrepreneurs who took advantage of a buoyant stock market to create giant enterprises, often through the exchange of overvalued paper for real assets. This authoritative and unprecedented books sheds light on the careers of the leading "conglomerateurs": Royal Little of Textron, Tex Thornton of Litton, James Ling of LTV, Charles Bluhdom of Gulf + Western and Harold Geneen of ITT.This is the behind-the-scenes story of the financial wizards and bare-knuckled businessmen who created the conglomerates, the glamorous multi-form companies that marked the high noon of post-World War II American capitalism. Covering the period from the end of the war to 1983, Robert Sobel explains why and how the conglomerate movement originated, how it mushroomed, and what caused its startling and rapid decline.

Several books have been written on the crash itself but non before has dealt with events leading up to it.The era of the 1920s was one of economic growth, and not merely tinsel and ballyhoo. For most of the period, stock market prices were not unreasonably high and investment capitalism matured and took on its present-day power. It was Wall Street's silver age.It was also and age of time purchases and of buying stocks on margin; an age when both practices were abused, but when Wall Street was no worse than Main Street. It was a period when government would not take major steps to correct the abuses and excesses. The few decisions made by the Federal Reserve were neither timely nor wise. A head of steam was building up for which there was no safety valve.When the great crash came it was not directly followed by an economic collapse. During the next year, government and business did nothing of importance to prevent the depression, whose severity could not be attributed to Wall Street.