Lazard Freres history

An INVESTMENT BANKING company founded in New Orleans in 1848 by Alexandre, Lazare, and Simon Lazard, originally as a dry goods store. The three had emigrated from France in that year but a year later were forced to move the business to San Francisco because of a citywide fire in New Orleans. The gold rush had just begun in California, and the business soon began trading gold. Four years later, they opened a branch in Paris, now firmly established in the gold business.

By the end of the Civil War, Lazard was a fullfledged international bank specializing in gold trading. A London branch was also established, and in 1880, a New York office was opened by Alexandre Weill; it became known as Lazard Freres. The New York office was only one of the branches of the bank; it specialized in gold trading and underwriting of some securities issues but remained a small operation until World War II. During the war, Andre Meyer arrived in New York after working in the firm’s Paris office. Meyer already had a substantial background in finance, although he was not from an old family, as were the Weills. He took control of the office. After the war Lazard Freres emerged as a specialist in MERGERS and acquisitions as well as maintaining its business in underwriting.

The firm benefited from the postwar merger boom in the United States. Meyer and a younger partner, Felix Rohatyn, aligned themselves with Harold GENEEN at the ITT Corporation, and Lazard became ITT’s major merger banker. The firm helped the corporation with many of its major acquisitions as it built itself into a conglomerate and also served other companies. Much of the firm’s success in the 1960s and 1970s was built around the relationship with ITT. Meyer died in 1979, and Lazard remained primarily a merger specialist but was also a partnership through the late 1990s, when most other investment banks had gone public.

In the late 1990s, the firm began to suffer a loss of rank and prestige on Wall Street because of its small size and limited capital base. It was reorganized by Bruce Wasserstein, a Wall Street merger specialist who became the senior partner of the firm in 2001. The firm remained private, being the last of the traditional Wall Street private partnerships choosing not to sell shares to the public. It finally went public in 2005.

Further reading

• Geisst, Charles R. The Last Partnerships: Inside the Great Wall Street Money Dynasties. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001. 
• Reich, Cary. Financier: The Biography of Andre Meyer. New York: William Morrow, 1983.