President Donald Trump pardoned Michael Milken almost exactly 30 years after the junk-bond king pleaded guilty to securities fraud, Bloomberg News reported. Milken’s rise behind an X-shaped desk in Beverly Hills was so sharp that it fueled the buyout boom and the reign of junk bonds, though his colleagues inside Drexel Burnham Lambert preferred the term high yield. His fall, culminating in 22 months in prison for illegal trades, was so steep that it helped turn him into a symbol for the avarice of an entire industry and era. The 73-year-old billionaire’s rescue by Trump was so astounding that Wall Street observers wondered if he would try to return to the securities industry that banned him for life. Around the time that Trump was trying to transform himself into a king of 1980s New York real estate, Milken was helping to turn junk bonds from a backwater of risky corporate debt into a trillion-dollar market. Those bonds let a ragtag group of corporate raiders borrow enough to take over some of America’s best-known companies, and Milken inspired Wall Street acolytes who stayed loyal well past Drexel’s bankruptcy — and his tearful apology in court for securities fraud.
