Sublime

24. At the height of Lorenzo’s borrowing, the cash that Lorenzo laid out in interest alone—more than $600 million a year—exceeded the annual sales for nearly 100 members of the Fortune 500. Alas for him, Lorenzo’s size also made him more visible, and more inviting, as a target.

Donald Durant understood the common person, someone élite bankers, including the Higginsons, had politely ignored for decades. Since the Civil War, bankers had focused on wealthy institutions: first the railroads, then industrial companies, and most recently foreign corporations and governments. But now that individual human beings, men and women,

controversial for buying distressed debt in economically failing countries at a discount and then taking aggressive legal action to force the strapped nations, which had expected their loans to be forgiven, to instead pay him back at a profit.

In a matter of hours, Merrill Lynch, with a history of nearly one hundred years as one of the most storied names on Wall Street, would be sold to Bank of America for the biggest premium in the history of banking mergers. It was, as one newspaper later put it, as if Wal-Mart were buying Tiffany’s.

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