The Wall Street Journal reports on the return of an old-fashioned business model: the merchant bank. The article reminds me of one of my favorite books as a boy.  

Luxury conglomerate LVMH will buy Loro Piana for $2.6 billion, the New York Times reports. One of these days I hope to read (or write) the definitive investment case study of LVMH and Bernard Arnault. How did the son of a French provincial construction company owner  compound a relatively modest sum of initial capital into […]

The Wall Street Journal profiles the Koch Brothers, who are trying to position themselves as midwestern corporate buyer of choice in order to compete with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. The article mentions one company, Guardian Industries, in which Koch Industries took a minority stake after Byron Trott of BDT & Co. connected the two. Trott […]