As a veteran of the finance industry, I can safely say that the industry does make a real contribution to society, however there is a "but" here. It is also full of ruthless, greedy, narcissistic, over-paid and dangerously short-sighted individuals.
I think it's somewhat disingenuous to say that Milken's great insight was discovering that junk bonds weren't risky: rather, his insight was that there was a profitable inefficiency in the gap between the risk-offset price in junk bonds and the yield of such bonds.
It seems like there's been a concerted effort to "rehabilitate" Milken, or even build a narrative that he was set up as a fall guy in the '80s. But _Predator's Ball_ and _Den Of Thieves_ tell a pretty detailed story about what was happening in the leveraged financing practices at the time.
This is an incredible use of the referly platform - interesting idea with a cool article, and then several affiliate links to books on the same subject.<p>+1 great execution of this business model
Just regarding the note on Apple cash.. Its 137.1 billion usd in cash.. Not 10 billion.<p>Source: <a href="http://m.techcrunch.com/2013/01/23/apple-now-has-many-billions-in-cash-more-than-hps-annual-revenue-and-vietnams-gdp/" rel="nofollow">http://m.techcrunch.com/2013/01/23/apple-now-has-many-billio...</a>
I love the idea of suggesting books to get people familiar with an industry they probably don't know a lot about. I think people jump to conclusions about Wall Street being useless based on not really understanding what Wall Street does. Think about it: if Wall Street were useless, would anyone care whether it was working properly or not? It is precisely because it is useful that we care about it running well and correctly.
The biggest insight Milken was that you could create junk bonds. Lookign back this seems trivial, but no one else had thought of doing this.
Junk bonds used to be the so called "fallen angel", bonds issued by highly rated credit companie sthat later were downgraded. All of the bonds trading in the market were bonds that lost their rating. The big idea was that companies with poor credit could issue bonds, which no one had realized yet.<p><pre><code> This opened up a lot of capital to firm, some of which were startup in nature, that previously couldn't get capital. This drove real economic growth that built real things.</code></pre>