“Forest Gamp” notes of bank light light on an era

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At a break during the 2009 Citigroup Board of Directors meeting, Robert Robin is close to Wall Street numbers of the most influential for the company’s external investment consultant, Scottbook.

At that time, former US Treasury Minister Robin told Citi CEO, that he knows his father, and he was mistakenly assumed that he was the son of Derek Book, the respected researcher and former head of Harvard University. The bank’s father’s parents were more humble – a leakage in a high school in the Middle West, and he supported his family by installing the columns of the phone. However, this beginning was not hindered by a four -decade profession in Wall Street, which was narrated in Scottbook notes The rest of Wall Street: The story of victory, tragedy and timing He was appointed to the post next week.

During this running, hundreds of millions of dollars in shares and payment (also bought Greenhill shares sometimes), as he eventually accumulated enough place to become the head of Ivy League University Secretaries as well as the American Manhattan Museum of Natural History.

For the largest names in Wall Street, Book makes perhaps a list-which is recognized by his autobiography. Bok told me that he resembles his professional arc in the areas of Forest Gamp-maybe he was not the most important man in the room, but at least with a seat in the front class in several historical moments, pushing him to a position to influence outside Wall Street.

While the book has been in the works since the epidemic, it raises some of the questions that appear to be closely related in 2025 – including whether all social, political and cultural power accumulated by the financiers in the Golden Age of our financing ultimately is a good thing for the rest of America, including people like Bok’s father. Then if this era will be destroyed by Trump with an internal appearance.

I met Book for the first time 20 years ago when I applied for a job in Greenhill & Co, founded Boutique Consultant Merger a decade ago by Robert Greenhill, a pioneering investment bank. Greenhill spent contracts in Morgan Stanley and founded his company, which has a name after a long time in Smith Barney, where he was expelled in the mid -1990s by Sandy Will and replaced his deputy Jimmy Damon. Greenhil employed Facebook, then in the late thirties and an old warrior in the Companies Law and Morgan Stanley, to lead deals and then increasingly to operate Greenhill & Co.

The company flourished immediately in New York and London, and found that CEOs liked to work with smaller companies.

When Bok met that interview in 2005, Greenah was publicly publicly, and after a few years she achieved the capital at a market of $ 2 billion. It was a great time, as it was coming to the spin in making deals all over the world just as the hedge and private stock boxes were spreading. The wealth of the inexpensive character was promoted as the stock markets continued, with a few pottery, at a height.

Greenhill’s executive team has repeatedly took the money from the table in stock sales and profit returns. However, Greenhill was not good. Many massive competing companies were formed and BOK failed to keep up with it. The media’s attention dried out once. Book tells various simple clashes with journalists, including me. In 2023, the Japanese bank Mizuho acquired Greenhill for $ 550 million, which assumes a lot of debts. The share purchase price of $ 15 was away from $ 90, which was traded in the late first decade of the twentieth century.

The sale and lessons of Greenhill on the fragility of financial institutions were supposed to be the BOK book code. But the events interfered and presented a conclusion. Book was attracted to the highlight of the public light because of his role as head of the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania amid the college protests that followed the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel on October 7, 2023. Bok supported the president at the time and the field of the institute at the Campus Affairs Institute despite their trial in the end.

Bok offers the first detailed version of those events here – worth reading and thinking. It is also noted that Fraas even thwarted a battle between a different agenda of a group of beneficiaries of the millionaire and billionaire, even when the university remained an institution with a wide range of students, graduates and research.

Book, like the many ruling class in Wall Street, has owe a lot of his wealth to ride a wave of money in the United States over the past forty years. At the end of the upper term, Bok has humility to recognize this good luck. A series of high -quality professions has been set in the coming years and I am curious to know which other masters of the universe will be independent.

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