The Taking Of Lazard

Bruce Wasserstein is trying to be diplomatic -- really he is -- as he compares Lazard Ltd. (LAZ ), the storied investment bank that he runs, with Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs (GS ), Merrill Lynch, and JPMorgan Chase (JPM ). But tact does not come naturally to Wasserstein, the preeminent merger-and-acquisition tactician of the rough-and-tumble 1980s.

"People get upset if you deprecate anybody, and I don't want to," says Wasserstein, chairman and CEO of Lazard, which more or less invented M&A as an investment banking specialty during the 1960s and 1970s heyday of Felix Rohatyn. "But we're sort of in a group by ourselves when it comes to the quality of the advice we provide. Quality is not the focus of a lot of our competitors because having lots of capital is their focus, or lending capital, or whatever it is."