What I’m Reading

“On gray days, when it’s snowing or raining, I think you should be able to call up a judge and take an oath that you’ll just read a good book all day, and he’d allow you to stay home.”

Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

The Caesars Palace Coup

Lost in the aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crisis, the legal battle over Caesars raged. A leveraged buyout on the eve of the Crisis left the company in dire financial condition right when it needed a solid financial position the most. The ensuing legal battle between investment juggernauts such as Apollo, Oaktree, and Appaloosa involved dozens of financial companies and law firms, and billions of dollars.

This book was not quite what I was expecting it to be, but I still enjoyed it. Quite frankly, I was expecting it to be a lot more exciting. In my head, I was picturing a book that had some details about the financial and legal side of the buyout, but read more like a novel. A large part of this can be attributed to the mental images are conjured up by leveraged buyouts and casinos. This book ended up containing more details about the legal and financial battles, and while there were a few times that I had to stop, think things through a bit, and re-read, I came away from this book with a much greater understanding of what happens in the massive bankruptcy battles that we never seem to hear the details of.

Merchants of Debt

One of the most interesting things that I have learned in my studies of finance and business is that there are a few select companies that have a huge amount of control in the world, yet we rarely hear about them. One of those companies is the leveraged buyout company KKR.

Merchants of Debt details the history of KKR and its journey from fledgling to titan. Along the way, we hear about some of the more famous Wall Street characters, as well as some of the companies that we hold near and dear, including Nabisco, which was purchased by KKR.

This book does a great job of giving the reader a good understanding of how LBOs work, as well as an overview of many of the important figures in financial history. A lot of the people and companies mentioned in this book are the subject of their own books, such as the Nabisco LBO, as detailed in Barbarians at the Gate, and Michael Milken, who is the subject of more books than I can count. The book isn’t overly complicated and has a smoothly flowing plot that is not always present in non-fiction books.