Deal Decade

US companies are still reeling form the takeovers, leveraged buyouts, junk bonds, recapitalizations and other financial restructuring transactions that reshaped corporations in the 1980s. This book discusses how those transactions affected corporate performance and altered the relationship between corporate management and the financial markets. The authors explain that the financial restructuring was driven by a dispute over who should control large public corporations, what their goals should be, to whom the organizations and their managers should be accountable, and how to make them more accountable. Although the financial restructuring itself has died out, this conflict remains unresolved and will continue to influence the business climate. The book addresses a number of issues. Why did long-dormant questions about corporate performance governance surface in the 1980s? Why did they manifest themselves in takeovers and financial restructurings? Why would capital structure be likely to affect corporate performance? Were the increased use of debt, the rapid pace of innovation in financial markets, and the explosion in takeover activity independent phenomena or related? And if related, which caused which? Finally, why did the impulse to restructure subside without having resolved the controversies that underlay it?