Lazard Lands Some Big Ones

And among them is a "supreme door opener"

What's in a name? Quite a lot, if the name happens to be Arthur Burns and it belongs to the legendary economist who left the Federal Reserve Board in March after eight years as chairman. Last week, following a quiet little bidding war for his services, the former Fed chief accepted a job as "senior adviser" at the highly influential investment banking firm of Lazard Freres. While Henry Kissinger surely holds the modern pay record for ex-Washington officials in part-time jobs on Wall Street,* Burns will do all right for a retired bureaucrat of 74. His retainer: reportedly in the $100,000 to $200,000 a year range.

Burns was wooed to the Lazard firm by Andre Meyer, 80, the firm's longtime senior partner and chief deal maker who retired, at least formally, late last year. But he and his successor, Michel David-Weill, 45, a French-born, fourth-generation member of the founding Lazard family, have scored other recent recruiting coups. Three weeks before the Burns announcement, Lazard startled the club by world of New York investment banking by poaching four senior men from a much larger rival, Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb. Among them was James Glanville, 55, a Lehman managing director who is a top specialist in energy-industry financing, and his close friend Ian MacGregor, 65, the former Amax chief and vice president of the International Chamber of Commerce.

Though small by major investment-bank standards, Lazard has prospered, mostly by being aggressively traditional. Following a Wall Street fashion, Lehman and other firms have been busy turning themselves into financial "supermarkets" that do everything from securities trading and corporate advice to merger brokering. Yet Lazard has remained a loosely structured group of partners; it aims to avoid large-volume low-profit activities like brokerage and remain a "deal" firm specializing in big corporate sales and mergers. A recent Lazard achievement: it put together Chrysler's sale of its European operations to Peugeot. While, at larger firms, the earnings from such deals are typically shared by all the partners, at Lazard the partner who brings in a deal gets a big chunk of the profit.

David-Weill has cut Lazard's roster of full partners from 30 to 21. Those remaining, including the best-known of all, Felix Rohatyn, 50, the mastermind of New York City's financial rescue, have agreed to reduce their share of profits to make more money available for recruitment. To move into municipal bond trading, David-Weill hired the top traders at five of the biggest bond houses. Some other heavyweight hires: Frank Zarb, once the Ford Administration's energy czar, and Donald Cook, former chairman of American Electric Power, one of the U.S.'s largest utilities. Both Zarb and Cook were brought in to help Lazard expand as an adviser to foreign governments in arranging large financings.

That was the reason Lazard was so eager to battle Salomon Brothers and other large firms for Burns' services. As an economic adviser to every President since Eisenhower, he has a wide range of powerful contacts abroad. Says one Lazard partner: "He will be the supreme door opener. He knows the heads of all the central banks of the world on a first-name basis. Who is going to refuse a call from Arthur?"

* Exactly what Goldman, Sachs pays the former Secretary of State as a "consultant" is a secret. But knowledgeable banking sources say that he is "very, very expensive," with an annual stipend of $250,000 or more plus expenses and a fee of $25,000 to $50,000 for every appearance he makes on behalf of the firm.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.