In the 1960s, Jews were again in the forefront in creatinga new business form - the conglomerate, a multi-purpose holdingcompany whose disparate profit centers were purportedly synergistic- greater than the sum of its component parts. It was not a Jewishinvention - that honor probably belongs to Royal Little of Textronbut Lehman Brothers, Lazard Freres, LoebRhoades, and Goldman Sachs were forceful in sellingthe new notion. Besides the self-interest of these investmentbanking houses (the major interest in conglomerates was only partiallydue to new products, market penetration, increased revenues, balancesheet growth, and rising price-earnings ratios), mergers and acquisitionsgenerated volumes of new corporate issues that Wall Street underwrote,sold, and traded. And a number of Jewish businessmen were quick to see the potentialof the new financial form. Prudent and conservativemoney managers were skeptical of the conglomerate: it had a strikingresemblance to earlier over-blown, credit-created pyramids, whichhad appeared earlier and milked unsuspecting investors beforecollapsing. Business history was littered with square cannon balls,rotten tulip bulbs and burned-out matches from Ponzi-like operatorsof the John Laws and Ivor Kreugers. "Jews and Money: TheMyths and the Reality," Gerald Krefetz, Ticknor & Fields,New Haven and New York, 1982, p. 12.