ABSTRACT
In the third week of March 1984, the faithful, fifteen hundred strong, came to Beverly Hills to pay homage to Michael Milken, the legendary junk-bond guru of Drexel Burnham Lambert whom many of his followers simply called "the King". The energy, excess, and glitz of the Decade of Greed were not confined to the annual Predators' Balls. To the investing public, Milken became a symbol of everything that was wrong in the 1980s—greed, market manipulation, hostile takeovers, savings bank collapses, and more greed. While the long-term impact of financing corporate growth with high-interest junk bonds is open to controversy, nothing gripped the public imagination more than the use of junk in corporate takeovers. Part of the trouble, as academics pointed out, was that Milken's historical analysis of junk bonds was based on so-called fallen angels, the once highly-rated debt of once-sound companies that had fallen on hard times.
