How ‘Bid ’em Up Bruce’ became yesterday’s man

When Lazard presented its results at the start of May, you might have expected the investment bank’s smooth-talking chairman Bruce Wasserstein to have been in upbeat mood. After all, Wasserstein trades on his reputation as the greatest mergers and acquisitions banker of all time. Lazard likes to think of itself as the finest M&A house in the world. And we are, in case you hadn’t noticed, going through one of the greatest merger booms of recent times: so far this year deals worth $2 trillion have been struck globally, a 60 per cent advance on the same point last year.

So was Lazard raking in money? Well, not quite. In truth, its results were disappointing: first-quarter profits up by a rather modest 4.9 per cent; advisory revenues flat; targets set by the share analysts missed; and the shares marked down on the day.

An ice-cream man who can’t shift his cones during a heatwave might wonder if he was in the right trade. Likewise, it now looks possible that the Wasserstein magic, so widely trumpeted when he was drafted in to take control of the ailing house of Lazard five years ago, just isn’t working.

‘Lazard was really quite a special place,’ said William Cohan, a Lazard banker for many years, who recently published a fascinating history of the firm, The Last Tycoons. ‘It created the technology of the M&A business, and it was very good at it. But I don’t think Bruce Wasserstein cares about any of that. He cares about Bruce Wasserstein.’

Of all the major investment banks, few have a richer history, or a greater mythology, than Lazard: probably only Rothschild comes close. Likewise, in a world full of grey, number-crunching bankers, few players have a bigger reputation than Bruce Wasserstein: the man known on Wall Street as ‘Bid ’em Up Bruce’ for his legendary ability to squeeze every last dollar out of a deal.