NCJ Number
149797
Date Published
1993
Length
327 pages
Annotation
This analysis of the role of fraud in the leveraged buyouts arranged by Michael Milken and the company Drexel Burnham Lambert argues against economic organizational theories, particularly agency theory.
Abstract
The author concludes that such buyouts have multiple and extensive consequences for the organization of business and the economy. The analysis also demonstrates how ordinary bond trading networks were linked to the extraordinary networks of the Boesky Organizations and Employee Private Partnerships to defraud bond issuers and buyers. The text details the events the events that led to the government's discovery of evidence of the fraud, describes how the repeated use of fraud networks institutionalized fraud as a way of doing business, and explains the fraud's consequences for buyers and investors. It also describes how the nature of securities transactions makes them amenable to fraud and examines the economic and legal context in which this fraud developed. The book challenges the concept of rational economic organization in the 1980's and calls for more empirically valid and relevant theories of economic organizations. In these theories, power is central to explanation and financial organizations are revealed as the driving force of the transformation of corporate control and the economy. Glossary, index, and more than 300 references