THE FINANCIERS

The Financiers is the latest discovery that there are some wolves in Wall Street. It's a sober announcement, documented by a dozen tales baring the activities of the plutocratic godfathers known as investment bankers. The rich cast of characters--featuring Howard Hughes, ITT's Harold Geneen, Big Mac's (and Lazard Freres') Felix Rohatyn, and other generals who issue financial marching orders to the captains of industry--provide exemplars for modern Walter Mittys: ""With the market running par to par and a quarter, with requests for more notes still coming in, and with the stabilization effort limited for the moment to just over one million dollars, looks to me like it's in very good balance."" Pocketa-pocketa go the computers as AT&T borrows $1.6 billion, New York City is saved (for the day) from, default, Penn Central reaches the end of the line. Among the cautionary tales of misuse of insider information and conflicts of interest to be concluded in the daily papers are the final tax effect of the ITT-Hartford merger, the problem of dealing in ""rented stock,"" and the special case of Intra Bank, Beirut (which brings up the Arab boycott of Jewish banking firms). New and elegant feather merchant maneuvers, especially connected with the action in Middle East money, are predicted by Jensen. Written lucidly, his flirtation with muckraking is likely to be found in many a briefcase, next to the liverwurst sandwich.