Felix G. Rohatyn, Financier Who Piloted New York’s Rescue, Dies at 91
Just after the Fed's chairman, Arthur F. Burns, returned by a meeting with European leaders and cautioned Mr. Ford of this threat to international financial markets failed the White House agree to the loan guarantees.
Mr. Rohatyn was hailed for standing up to Mayor Beame as well as due to their ability to achieve agreement with bankers and union leaders alike. However, the chaos — a strike by sanitation workers, a tide of police layoffs, increases in transit , the imposition of tuition fees for the very first time in the City University of New York and, most importantly, the reduction of town liberty, yet temporary — redounded for decades.
The catastrophe didn't abate until 1978, when Mr. Rohatyn invented a Student financing bundle, which traded short-term high loans for equal amounts of lower-interest M.A.C. bonds. Beneath a new mayor, Edward I. Koch, the town balanced its budget 1980. It re-entered the municipal bond marketplace 1981, also by 1985 that the M.A.C. had ceased selling new bonds; the closing M.A.C. bonds weren't paid off before 2008.
Investors who purchased the bonds created healthy yields, and, beginning in 1983, the M.A.C. withdrew healthy surpluses, which Mr. Rohatyn utilized responsibly to direct policy from behind the scenes. Calmly pointing out to mayors and union leaders he believed they had been spending money unwisely, he left their receipt of their excess money conditional on their cutting costs. In addition, he employed the surpluses to set aside billions for colleges, transit, non – and – middle-income home, and also the hiring of police officers in reaction to the crack cocaine epidemic.
It had been an unprecedented exercise of personal power at City Hall, and it prompted Mr. Koch, either a friend and a foe, to inquire,"Who chosen Felix mayor?"
Mr. Rohatyn was stung by strikes from organized labour that in 1990, throughout a second, less severe downturn in the town's fortunes, he declared his resignation. Wall Street shuddered, and Gov. Mario M. Cuomo persuaded him to remain on for three more years.
A Household in Flight
Much like town he helped rescue, Mr. Rohatyn's early life was a combination of hardship and luxury. Born in Vienna on May 29, 1928, Felix George Rohatyn was the sole son of Alexander Rohatyn, a Polish Jew, and also the prior Edith Knoll, the daughter of a booming Viennese banker. Alexander handled his father-in-law's breweries in Austria, Romania and Yugoslavia before 1934, if the rising Nazi menace motivated the family to uproot itself to France.
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